Customer Care Starts with Curiosity and Empathy

Startup teams have to cultivate an ongoing intense curiosity in every team member on how the product creates value for the customer and how to remove anything that limits the value customers will get from the product.

“Empathy isn’t dictated to us by a focus group or a statistical analysis. Empathy is the powerful (and rare) ability to imagine what motivates someone else to act. What is required is a persistent effort to understand how other people see the world, and to care about it.”
Seth Godin in “If I Were You…“

In an early stage startup with less than 15 people everyone wears multiple hats and is in regular contact with prospects and customers. As a result, everyone needs to be curious about customers and cultivate empathy–an appreciation for other perspectives in a conversation or interaction.

In larger firms sales, customer service, and research are handled by specialists–in fact they may be segmented further into sub-specialties–who only “play their position” and can lose sight of a holistic perspective on customer needs.

But in early stage startups there is much less rigid specialization: it’s easier for someone who is solving a customer problem by fixing a bug or advising them of a workaround to attempt to gain a better understanding of customer needs. Everyone is still trying to learn more about customer needs and use that understanding to improve sales, marketing, support, and overall strategy. This is essential to enhancing a startup’s products and services. Because every team member is customer-facing, it’s clear that success flows from providing value to customers.

My advice to founders is to value the perspective of functional experts but to be careful not to lose your curiosity and your empathy. Appreciate a holistic or systems view that incorporates how the different roles need to harmonize and support each other to provide customer care. And to remember that everyone can provide insights into customer needs if they retain their curiosity and ask questions while they focus on the specifics of their role.

More at https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2023/02/01/customer-care/

Image Credit: "Never underestimate the power of a simple gesture” by Harsh Darji (@harshdarji_4)