Keep your customers happy if you want to keep your customers

A friend was complaining about how antiquated the apartment maintenance business is. From collecting rent to paying bills to responding to maintenance problems, everything is manual. You spend all day making phone calls and chasing down contractors, or you can hire a management company to make those phone calls for you.

Rental management therefore seems like a huge industry ripe for disruption. No surprise, there’s startups already working on it, including one that had pitched me recently. So I told my friend to give them a try.

When we looked at the company as investors, we focused on vision, market size, founding team, competition. What we missed was the most important factor for success of any business: execution.

What I discovered through my friend’s experience about execution was shocking.

My friend filled out the contact form on the startup’s website. He expected someone would get back to him within a hour or two. But by the next day, still no reply.

So he tried calling. A woman answered every question with “Someone will get back to you,” but couldn’t say who or when. It wasn’t until a few days later that someone, clearly from a call center, called him back late at night over a bad connection. Was he ready to sign up? Well, no, he had some questions.

“Oh, someone will have to get back to you.” Nobody called for another week. Faceplant. By then my friend had given up.

Digging around, he found reviews of the company. Mixed in with a bunch of glowing fake reviews were the real complaints. Bad service. Lack of responsiveness. Maintenance problems not getting fixed. In other words, a disaster.

You might think this is an isolated incident of one poorly executing startup. It’s not. This particular example may be a bit extreme, but most startups fail on customer service.

B2B or B2C or even B2B2C and B2G, founders seem more focused on funding and features than the gruntwork of signing up customers and keeping them happy.

The thinking seems to be that for the founders, every customer except perhaps the very largest are someone else’s problem, whether that be a head of sales, account managers, customer support team, or call center assistant.

And that’s true if you work for a big company, or even at a Series B startup, with a well-oiled machine where everyone knows exactly what they’re supposed to do. That’s not how it works at an early-stage startup.

The customer is the CEO’s responsibility. Customers are the only reason for a business to exist. Assuring customer satisfaction is the most important job of the CEO.

Does that seem blindingly obvious? I thought so. And yet…

As a consumer, my experience is that most startups are slow to respond and slow to address problems; some make me feel like they’re doing me a favor just to reply at all.

The number of website contact forms I’ve filled out that have disappeared into the void is dismaying. Even if I’m not your ideal customer profile or your product isn’t ready yet, come on, send a reply. Get to know the potential customer and their needs.

I get that you’re building an airplane while flying through the air and there are priorities that may not include me. Still, it takes only a few minutes to find out my requirements. Responsiveness will pay dividends later even if I’m not about to become a customer now.

Prioritization is the most difficult task of a startup founder. There’s fundraising to hire the employees to build the product without which any discussion of customers is moot. And then there’s marketing activities to bring in new customers which will bring in more funding which will allow you to hire more people and solve all problems. In theory.

And yet…if you don’t keep the customers you already have, the cycle spins in reverse.

Execution isn’t just adding more whizzy features or even signing up customers. It’s keeping them. And the only way to keep customers is to keep customers happy.

In my stints as a startup CEO, I instituted an aggressive response policy:

  • All customer inquiries would get a response within 2 hours.
  • All requests for quotes would get a quote within a day.
  • All customer support issues would get a useful response within 2 hours.
  • All critical bugs would get a temporary fix within a day.

Meeting these goals with a 10 person team wasn’t always easy, especially with users all over the world. How do you deal with a support call at 2 AM from a frustrated customer in Germany? It wasn’t easy. But we found a way.

Engineers hated taking sales calls. Everyone hated taking support calls. Too bad.

People got sick, had personal priorities (no support calls on wedding day!), even took vacations. Fortunately, some employees were morning people, some worked late at night.

Everyone was trained to fill multiple roles so that if one person was out, someone else could fill in. The accountant wasn’t expected to fix bugs. But she was expected to answer the support hotline when everyone else was busy, collect basic information, and if it was an urgent problem, track down someone to respond right away.

One useful side effect was that because no dev likes to talk to a frustrated German at 6 am when the code is busted, the product got tested thoroughly prior to release. The sales team became more selective about targeting its marketing so they wasted less time on inquiries that weren’t a good fit.

Is this efficient? In the strictest sense, no. It maximizes for customer satisfaction rather than short term growth at all costs. I’ve had other founders tell me I was stupid. I had the last laugh. Because we survived and thrived and they eventually crashed and burned.

Why? Customers loved our responsiveness. It took our competitors a week to respond to inquiries, two weeks to generate a quote, a month to troubleshoot a bug, half a year to release a fix. We got the job done for them and they loved us for it.

And the devs who had to respond to customer inquires and accountants forced to answer the support hotline — did they hate their jobs? Far from it. They were proud to be part of a company that focused on customers instead of just money, money, money.

Industries are small places. People talk. Employees move to competitors. Slack boards and user forums make it easy to compare notes. For consumer products, there’s online reviews from Amazon to Reddit to App Store. Reputation matters. No number of fake reviews can make up for a single aggrieved customer.

So if you want to succeed as a startup CEO, there’s only one piece of advice that matters. It’s not about pitch decks, it’s not about AI. It’s about humans. Create a product that delights customers, then do whatever it takes to keep them satisfied and coming back for more.

If your startup is building a teleporter, how do you keep the customers happy? For starters, they need to arrive in one piece and not get blown into individual atoms.

Is that what’s happening at the startup SuprDupr? The company’s founder isn’t talking and the chief of police refuses to check. So when her brother goes missing, Sumire recruits her ex-boyfriend, the hacker, Ted Tatsu Hara, to find out.

See what happens in the award-winning startup mystery novel, To Kill a Unicorn.