Growth Hacking Through Customer Support

If you hope to be a successful entrepreneur in today’s highly competitive and fast-paced world, one must continually reinvent and adapt those methods and strategies that help you achieve what you want to achieve. Assuming that that goal is growing your business, proprietors of the company need to think out of the box and explore strategies that are creative and rooted in data and analysis. This is vital if one wants one’s company to survive and thrive. The problem, however, is that acquiring customers and retaining them can seriously dent the pockets of new business  owners and may led them to ditch a business model built on a solid foundation. That’s when growth hacking comes into the picture.

• The phrase was coined by the founder of Startup-Marketing, Sean Ellis. What is essentially says is that to ensure a rate of growth that is above the average, a business that adopts growth hacking, is one that combines engineering and marketing. Simply put, a growth hacker is a person who uses creative, low-cost techniques to acquire and retain customers. The way it works is simple and varies for each company; it is based on understanding why you grow and discovering methods to make it happen over and over again. To start this process, you would have to ensure that there is demand for your product. It is important to test our product continuously and get some feedback with regards to if you are on the right track or not. Some examples of this include:
  Creating a blog post that contains content that can be shared on various platforms.
• Publishing posts and write-ups about the product/company on blogs. This can be shared as well.
• Making content for social media.

While they usually can be divided into three main categories, namely content marketing, product marketing and advertising, a surprise area that can be converted into a growth hack is that of customer support. Generally customer support never finds itself mentioned when it comes to growth hacks and this is largely because good customer support experiences are, even now, fairly rare. Nowadays, it is only about answering customer queries and fielding their complaints. What most people don’t realise, is that given that a free customer support system can be the first interaction your customer has with the company, they can play a very important role in acquiring customers and building loyalty. Here are some ways great customer support can ensure some  growth:

1. Building sales through word of mouth and recommendations.

Getting your basics of accurate and quick replies, understanding and assisting customers and sometimes going over and above your defined role, can help put your client at ease. This will make you appear more approachable and thus makes it easy for them to speak to you on the products. This allows you to share some insights and information on the product. This will encourage word-of-mouth and lead to recommendations.

2.Understand Customer Satisfaction.

Satisfied customers play a huge role in ensuring the success and growth of a business.
If they are happy with the service they are getting, it is likely that they would tell their peers about it. Customer support can be very useful in this respect. As they are constantly interacting with customers, they are perfectly placed to understand customer concerns regarding the service or product and also gather suggestion and tips from consumers on how to make the user experience better. This also shows customers that the company is listening to its users and is willing to work on bettering their service. This will also improve the company’s image with customers.

3.Be proactive when providing customer support.
Once your product has been advertised and is out there in the open, customer support plays a big role in winning people over to your product or service. A personalised welcome mail can go a long way to build rapport with customers. It’s best to do it manually at first, so that it doesn’t get caught in the spam folder. It is also important to keep tabs on those customers who haven’t used the service or app in a while. This conveys to them that help and assistance can be found if needed. It is also useful to understand customers who have chosen to not use the product or service or their reasons for the same.

4.Retaining customers through customer support.
When you have just launched your new business, it is important that customers understand the utility of your product or service as soon as possible. It is also equally important to identify users who are growing disinterested and figure out how to engage them. To fix this, one can communicate with customers and figure out if there are any issues that they are facing with the product. This usually provides valuable insight into why they are losing interest and how you can address their concerns and needs. Finally, it is important to express gratitude to customers now and then. This lets customers know that you are thankful for the support they provide and care about making their experience a good one.