A prompt, well thought­out after sale support strategy is as important as sales and marketing.

Customers are going to experience roadblocks when using your product that your team won't know about. This is where prompt and superior customer support plays a crucial role. You have to make it easy for your customers to solve their issues (when they get stuck using your app) or have an easy way out to contact your team.

Here are best practices for serving and delighting your customers:

• Make each inbound support ticket count as this is an opening to build a relationship.
• One of the hardest aspects for any competitor to copy is exceptional customer support and you have an opportunity to make that count.
• Transparency ­ As you begin to scale paying customers, it is very important to set the right expectation levels for customer support. Investing in a helpdesk system to track every conversation to closure is imperative. If you are available for application support only for five days a week be upfront about it. Never promise something that you cannot live up to.
• Once you move from early adopters to mainstream customer base, remember that you are beginning to sell to "employees" of companies who are making a bet on your product on behalf of the organization. Sometimes their jobs are at stake. Being aware of this dynamic is important to position your product better and also define pricing appropriately to charge more for better support.
• You could charge more for priority phone support and SLA based support ­ many SMBs are willing to pay a premium for.
• Your support channel will also include sales. Engage, excite & keep your prospects and customers with fast, thoughtful responses.
• Prompt support leads to better sales and conversions. Setup a pre­sales team early and train employees. If you manage to teach even one new aspect to your customer, they start respecting you as a consultant and that is important in a sale as you go mainstream.
• Always use screenshots to guide customers when needed. A few file sharing tools you can use are Infinite, Droplr, CloudApp and Snagit.
• Build a powerful Help Centre and a FAQ section. Eventually, answers to your customer questions should come from here. Every support ticket response should have a link back to your help section.
• Think instant gratification: resolve issues and be very very prompt with answers.
• Let developers answer support requests. They will know how customers use what they have built.
• Drive delightful conversations towards a review/referral. Ask the "happy" customer to share their views about your product or customer and tell them you will be using this on your website/blog and marketing collateral. 80% of 5­star reviews for ZapStitch on AppStores were acquired during a livechat. Brightpod publishes quotes from customer service directly to their Buzz page ­ obviously, after taking permission from the customer.
  • ZapStitch has used Olark (the live chat tool) right from when they launched. Olark has been an integral part of their customer support arsenal. The focus is always on providing live product support, get customers feedback, reviews and sometimes just exchange quick plain hellos.
  • Brightpod uses Intercom for customer support and engagement. One in three of their emails have higher engagement if they are prompt, personal and brief. When customers convert they also look at how responsive the Brightpod team was with solving their queries.

Customer service should be practiced by everyone in your team. Weekly training sessions help ­ brainstorm interesting questions like "how is your product better than X", "why approach X makes sense vs. Y" etc. We tend to underestimate the need for training employees & helping them articulate these details consistently.

Always remember that acquiring a new customer is 7 times harder than retaining an existing one. So, keep your customers happy and delight them every time.