Do busy entrepreneurs give their customer base enough attention? How a virtual office can help

The biggest commodity that entrepreneurs have, aside from the financial side of things, is time. The process of starting, growing and maintaining your business can quite literally take up all day – every day.

This stretching of resources can also mean that certain areas of the business are not given enough attention. The service provided by Virtual Office MadeSimple is designed to free up resources and help entrepreneurs to focus on their entire business – so if you’re ready, choose a virtual office package today.

But what areas does this lack of resources cause startups to often neglect? And what practical ways can a virtual office help?

What areas do entrepreneurs neglect in their business?

When you are building a business, you have to focus where attention is most needed. As a result it’s quite understandable that entrepreneurs can sometimes be led astray, with certain areas being neglected.

Customer service and support is often a casualty of this neglect. Rutgers University lecturer and digital marketing strategist Glen Gilmore said, in an interview with Dan Schawbel for software giant Intuit, that “Too often, startups pour heart and soul into launching a product or service, then, don’t give it a chance to succeed by neglecting to put the same effort into customer service”.

But how does this impact a business?

• Not Knowing Your Customers – Dealing with calls and enquiries is an important part of running a business. However, it can be tempting to leave this side of things in the early days of a business. But, doing so will leave you with a poorer understanding of your audience – what they respond to and don’t respond to. This makes business decisions harder to gauge, as judging customer response is more difficult.
• Limited Growth – Poor customer service means people will drop out of your sales funnel. Sam Altman, president of seed accelerator Y Combinator said in a lecture at Stanford university that growth is more likely when you offer an experience that “a small number of users love, then a large number of users like”. If you provide a great experience in the early days, even when customer numbers are small, the potential for growth is improved.
• Reputation – When you are starting out, your business has a very fragile reputation – if it has any tangible reputation at all. It’s a precarious position, but the risk of bad customer service is significant, as you may very well have a negative reputation before a positive one without good customer service. You can fix mistakes – but if the only feedback is negative, it’s harder to turn the ship around.

The areas that a startup neglects tend to be the areas that are deemed ‘secondary’ to the primary goals of the business. This means that entrepreneurs often find themselves neglecting other areas of their lives – we’ve all heard the horror stories of people barely seeing their families or sleeping just a few hours per night.

The so called ‘primary’ areas tend to be product and launch related – or money and client related, with a significant amount of emphasis on marketing and brand too. These are important, but every part of your business is important. It’s all part of making the business work like a well-oiled machine – with every part playing a role in overall business success.

It’s a difficult process, but in some ways a virtual office can help ease the load – and really enhance customer service, whilst freeing up an entrepreneur to focus on the ‘main’ areas of their business.

How can a virtual office help entrepreneurs enhance their customer service?

Just how does a virtual office enable entrepreneurs to enhance their customer service and consequently allow them to focus on other areas of their business?

By using a virtual office, you save time and resources. But there are some specific areas in particular that are beneficial to customer service. These include:

Phone Services

Perhaps the most direct way that a virtual office can help enhance customer service is by providing phone support. For example:

• Our phone service packages include the ability to have messages taken by our expert customer support team and forwarded to you via email or SMS.
• Our UK based support team is extremely high quality, with an average ring time of 1.69 rings and a 98.65% answering rate – so they can deliver a better service than a startup may be able to provide on its own.

This enables the customer to feel like they have been dealt with in a timely and friendly way, whilst giving you the ability to respond at a moment that is more convenient – without skimping on service.

By providing timeliness, you can make a good impression right away – even when you are busy. There is also flexible pricing with a pay-per-use pricing model that means you can stay in control of your monthly payments.

Mail Forwarding & Registered Office Address

When it comes to customer service, perception is very important. By using our registered office and mail forwarding services you can create a strong impression. Use our London address as your business mailing address and show customers that your business carries a certain level of prestige – with a very central location.

This is also beneficial for startups, who often start trading at a home address – which you might want to keep separate from your business address. Mail forwarding is also available, so you can have your letters scanned and emailed to you – or forwarded by Royal Mail.

This changes the perception of your business, and can help make customer service more reliable with an expert team committed to forwarding all letters within 24 hours. This also frees you up, by not tying you down to a single location.

Startup strength in all areas – from the very beginning

There are many reasons why entrepreneurs choose to focus on certain areas of their business more than others. By outsourcing some of this focus on customer satisfaction to an experience virtual office provider like us, a small business is much more likely to succeed in the longer term.

A virtual office has the ability to ease the burden on startups, so the important area of customer service is much more likely to be dealt with professionally and positively at a crucial stage for business growth.

Take a look over our Virtual Office packages today and sign up for better customer service in your startup – and let yourself up focus on other areas of your business.

Did you find this useful? Make sure to comment and let us know. There are many other useful resources on our blog, so be sure to check it out – particularly the section on ‘Virtual Office’.

By Alex Novakovic at MadeSimple – Find Alex on Google+

Resources:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dalebuss/2012/07/05/meg-hirshberg-7-tips-for-family-life-of-entrepreneurs/
http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2014/12/03/how-to-run-all-aspects-of-a-startup/
http://genius.com/Sam-altman-lecture-1-how-to-start-a-startup-annotated