Table of Contents
Do not index
Do not index
🚀 Introduction to Customer Support at Startups
Introduction
Over the last 10 years, there’s been an explosion of literature detailing how to run startups — from engineering and product to more mundane tasks like incorporating and setting up options pools to scrappy ways of finding product market fit. To date, most founders have had a bent towards product and engineering or sales and marketing type roles, and so this has been a largely self-reinforcing trend.
One area that has been largely neglected—which we’ll argue is of at least as much importance—is customer support. This guide is aimed at addressing that gap and helping early stage startups mature their customer support practices.
Motivation
So why should you care about customer support? The short answer is that great companies have not only great product and great teams, but they also have great customer facing teams (of which, support is key).
Why is that the case? It helps to break down why companies end up creating support orgs. Fundamentally, people pay companies to solve their problems. Startups solve problems with products and services performed by people. Depending on the type of startup you are as well as your maturity, the amount of product vs. people can vary.
No matter how sophisticated your company becomes, however, you’ll always need to have some human component. When things break in your product, for exceptional cases, for customers that just want to deal with a human, or one of a number of other reasons. The human component of your solution is customer support: it fills the gaps for your product and is the key differentiator between good and great companies.
More practically speaking, there are three reasons you should care about building a strong support org:
- Understand your users so you can build a better product and deliver better support
- Prevent churn so your users stay and you retain your revenue
- Accelerate growth via word of mouth from happy customers
Outline
This guide is meant to be very practical rather than theoretical. In that spirit, we’ll keep discussions short and give concrete tactics and benchmarks. We’ve broken the guide into four stages that will be applicable to different stages of customer support:
- Pre-product-market fit startups
- Early product-market fit startups
- Hypergrowth startups
- Scale startups
Each section will discuss:
- key performance indicators (KPIs): which metrics are most important, how do you measure them, and benchmarks (where available)
- team: who should you hire, what roles are they filling, and how do you hire them
- tools: what types of tools should you use, which specific tools are available and what are their pros/cons
- processes and workflows: what do your team members need to be doing on a regular basis and how do you make these tasks repeatable
- future of support: what are the current trends (eg, AI) in support and what will likely change in the next few months and years (and what probably won’t change)
- preparing for growth: what are the milestones you should look for to start preparing for the next stage of support
Much of the content in this guide has been created with the help of subject matter experts coming from companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Rippling, Loom, Superhuman, Deel, Pave, and Fountain. We’re incredibly grateful for the time of each of these folks and hope that their knowledge and expertise can help many more startups deliver better support experiences.
We’ll publish interviews and case studies for these and other companies in our supplemental section along with playbooks and job descriptions we’ve created as templates to be used as a starting point in setting up your support team and processes.
Disclaimer
The original authors of this guide are the cofounders of Atlas, a YC-backed all-in-one customer support platform. As such, we definitely have strong opinions about support (and obviously about support tools), but will do our best to focus on the subject matter at hand in an unbiased way. We’d encourage the reader to do their own research (and hopefully Atlas will remain a strong contender for as your vendor of choice, but that’s for you to decide 😄).
