Whether you’re a small startup or a large corporation, the customer is always king. And now, more than ever, customers expect the royal treatment. In fact, 50% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t anticipate their needs! But for small businesses, giving customers that exceptional experience is not easy. How can your small customer service team compete with large corporations with more money, people, and resources?

Madhavi Katikaneni, Head of Customer Success at Captricity, told us her service team’s secret to success in a webinar earlier this year. Her team’s size means she’s required to wear many hats, including documenting processes, developing new procedures, and training new folks on her team. To handle the volume of work, her team uses technology — specifically Service Cloud Lightning. Madhavi shares the secrets to her success in customer service:

1. Having a 360 degree view of customers

With Service Cloud Lightning, Madhavi and her team are able to easily find case details, see customer details, and jump to reporting. Most of all, Madhavi explained that she’s able to have all her tools at her fingertips all in the same console.

“It’s a 360 degree solution — a one stop shop where I can get info about all the customers. We can track when the customer has written in before, what they are dealing with, if there’s a contact at the company, etc. It’s really great to get a full view of the customer throughout the customer lifecycle,” Madhavi said.

2. Meeting a 1-hour first response time

One of the goals of Captricity’s service team is to maintain a 1-hour first response time with their customers. To do so, Madhavi sets automation rules in conjunction with macros, so if anything gets escalated, or if a customer needs something specific that needs to go through another department, her team can handle it immediately.

“Being able to respond quickly to the customer and having a platform that pings us immediately and has those macros to give initial responses is important,” Madhavi said. “We can also achieve a 1-hour response time because I automatically get a notification within 30 minutes if someone in customer support isn’t able to first respond to a customer.”

3. Using metrics to understand customer needs

Madhavi uses metrics in Service Cloud Lightning like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to go above and beyond in understanding her customers. It not only informs her team of customer loyalty and customer feedback, but it tells them how customers describe and feel about them, and most of all, it reflects renewal rates.

“Customer success and customer experiences helps cultivate customer loyalty, so being responsive to our customers is a foundational part of that,” she said.

4. A technology that scales as you grow

Madhavi explained that as a fairly small company, finding the right solution is often a balance between getting something that works right out-of-the-box versus a longer term solution that scales as you grow.

“For us, we wanted to look forward, build for the future, and invest now so we have that infrastructure built,” she said. “So make sure you find a solution that scales with you. If you know you’re going to grow quickly, it’s better to have a system that scales earlier on and have it well-integrated into your support systems so it’s ready for you when you grow.”

Interested in trying Service Cloud Lightning? Sign up for a free trial now and be one of the first 100 to win Beats Headphones.

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Salesforce can help you find customers, win their businesses, and keep them happy so you can grow your business faster than ever. Learn more about our small business CRM solutions or follow us on Twitter @SalesforceSMB and join the conversation with #SalesforceGROW.