In the product-led era, great customer support isn’t just good business practice, it represents an invaluable opportunity for growth.

The latest research from Gartner finds that 64% of customer service and support leaders will focus on business growth in 2022. Increasingly, industry leaders recognize that customer management is knowledge management, and seek to harness customer insights to improve the product and grow their business.

Investing in your team’s customer support strategy is a critical step; here, we lay out three functions that founders ought to prioritize.

Product integration

Product integration means harnessing insights from customer interactions in one organized place so builders can directly apply them to the product.

For startups, customer support is an untapped goldmine for data-driven decision making. Your customer support tool should help you capitalize on every customer interaction, building a knowledge base that informs your product and processes.

Great customer support platforms seamlessly incorporate dashboards and metrics that inform their business practices. Traditionally, these insights are siloed in customer support teams, and don’t connect to developers and other teams in the company.

In your startup, it’s not enough to just capture insights from your customers. That knowledge base must be easily accessible to all of your teams, empowering you to build and grow your business with customers at the center.

Consolidation

Startup founders know the pain of sitting in front of a screen for hours, sifting through a mountain of customer requests and grievances. This inefficient approach halts workflows and diverts time from more pressing tasks.

To avoid this anguish, it’s essential to consolidate customer interactions in one place under one system. This saves needless headaches and prevents valuable customer information from falling through the cracks — housing all your customer operations under one roof.

Malleability

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for your customer management system; as Michael Redbord writes in the Harvard Business Review, when scaling your startup’s customer support, you must “pick tooling that matches your service channels, style, and workflows.”

Your successful customer support tool should be simple to get started with, customizable from day one, and adaptable as your business grows.

For startups in particular, your tool shouldn’t be bogged down by endless features you don’t need. Instead, you should only pay for features and capabilities that are suitable for your growth stage; in customer support, minimalism is elegance.

Customer success in your startup going forward

In 2022 and beyond, successful enterprises need to recognize every customer interaction as an asset.

As your customer support needs grow, it’s important to choose a malleable, consolidated, and integrated tool that delights your customers and informs your product-led growth from day one.

At DevRev, we understand this need and believe that makers (Dev) should be as close to the customers (Rev) as possible. Our platform synchronizes customer support, work management, and product planning in one place so your business keeps customers at the center.