A Small Business’s Customer Service Platform Runs on Efficiencies


Newer companies, particularly small businesses, are afforded a tremendous opportunity: customer support can be built from the ground-up to meet the precise needs of users. The effort put into great service today will pay dividends not only down the line, but immediately, supporting growth and establishing a reputation of being a customer-focused organization—a strong competitive differentiator in these times.

Thanks to modern tools, small businesses can easily provide top-tier service without requiring much effort, including the option to troubleshoot remotely as if in-person. Here’s more:

Encouraging Self-Service

Customer issues rarely seem to arrive during reasonable business hours, which is why it’s imperative for companies to develop and share resources online so users can try to solve problems for themselves at any time of day.

Small businesses must be strategic about this. Having an employee think through every possible problem that may arise is not a good use of time—plus, they’re not likely to be in the heads of users if the company is in its nascent stages—and results in a lot of useless information that practically encourages customers to reach out.

Crafting FAQs is an excellent task for small businesses to hand off to generative AI. Most vendors have begun including at least basic AI functionality in its standard software packages, where it can excel at completing monotonous, supporting tasks without requiring much ramp-up time. In this scenario, a company could share its support logs with the AI and ask it to comb the internet for corner-case issues customers may have posted about, then compile this information into a comprehensive FAQ relevant to what customers are experiencing right now. With time, the technology could even predict problems before they arise and tweak its content accordingly—helping service representatives prepare and enabling customers to feel seen.

If AI isn’t available in a small business’s software package, it’s worth considering bots: not as independently functional as AI but capable of taking a first pass at a customer’s issues and directing them to the right person.

Troubleshooting Remotely

Small businesses have to become efficient if they hope to scale, meaning there will be fewer resources available for concierge customer service. A balance has to be struck between self-service, one-to-one assistance, and FAQs, and it’s up to the customers to demonstrate what works best. Companies have to listen, but they also have to make an effort proactively.

Thankfully, existing technology enables small businesses to offer scalable support without sacrificing the personal touch. They can consider “remote support,” or remotely taking control of a customer’s machine to troubleshoot the issue quickly. This saves time going back-and-forth with a customer to identify the precise nature of their problem and reduces required resources by avoiding house calls and behind-the-scenes work that could pull in employees from across departments.

This solution is not without its issues. Customers might remain wary of company employees receiving access to their computers, especially when data privacy is such a pressing and prevalent topic. Finding the right software vendor can ameliorate their concerns—some remote support apps arrive with full end-to-end encryption capabilities in addition to maintaining compliance with any relevant governance.

Consider, also, the lift put on the customers themselves. Without remote support, they may be asked to bring their computer to, say, the Genius Bar at an Apple Store, or to complete basic troubleshooting steps before a technician can work on their machine. Meanwhile, modern remote support doesn’t require a separate software download and can work across platforms and operating systems flawlessly.

Taking Queues

With the pieces in place to provide exemplary customer service, small businesses must then consider how to maximize limited resources, the most important of which being employees’ time.

The best way to support customer service folks, specifically, is to empower them with a technology platform that acts as a centralized base of operations. Thankfully, software that supports remote assistance can also include embedded service queues, which consolidate customer requests and present them in order of urgency—or, in some cases, assign them automatically to the proper technician. Some even provide the option to create a custom URL for users to visit and raise requests rather than forcing them to bookmark or track down a long address just to ask for help.

Streamlining this process helps with internal adoption, as well. Employees get used to doing things a certain way, and anything that disrupts this familiarity is going to be met with some level of hostility. However, a lot of customer service software these days, particularly when folded into a unified system powered by a CRM, can be embedded into existing workflows and displayed on personalized dashboards so each employee can access the technology flawlessly. This work lays a foundation for employees at small businesses to establish efficiencies that can be passed to future hires.

Service From Afar

Small businesses cater to customers who do business everywhere: from their smartphones, on their work computers, and through their IoT devices. It makes sense, then, for companies to meet customers where they are by enabling service encounters to happen instantaneously and however a customer prefers. Remote assistance plays a large role in establishing proximity, but carries the added benefit of encouraging one-to-one interactions with customers. The better small business employees understand those they are serving, the more prepared they can be when facing the truly unexpected—something small businesses face every day.



Raju Vegesna As Chief Evangelist at Zoho, Raju Vegesna plays a leading role in presenting Zoho's message to the business market worldwide.