Good Customer Service Can Make or Break Small Businesses

I had a great tech support experience from a tech start-up company this week which really reminded me of why working with small businesses can have its benefits.

I know big companies have big resources and, in principle, that means they get things done faster and with economies of scale they can pass on to their customers. But, leaving the latter debate to one side, doesn’t your heart sink sometimes when you need to get customer support from a big corporate?

In particular, getting technical help can be a frustrating business because the first line support tends to assume – often for good reason – that you have no idea what you’re doing. Reporting a problem that can’t be solved by turning it off and on again can involve jumping through their hoops to an extent that borders on humiliating.

And that’s where my experience with Easy CSV differs. I’ve been helping a client with a simple automation to export incoming customer enquiries from their web server to a Google Sheet where their sales team can act on each new lead as it comes in. To bridge the gap between the two systems, I used a service from a small business called Easy CSV. Their onboarding was very helpful and once implemented, the integration worked beautifully. Right up until it didn’t. In a period of 48 hours, two enquiries simply went missing and according to the logs, the Google Sheets API had timed out waiting for a connection. And with a system like this, “good enough” just wasn’t acceptable.

But a company with good customer service can turn a disappointing experience into one so good that you tell your friends and colleagues about it.

And on this occasion, after reporting the problem I got an email soon after from the company founder, Max, explaining that their code had now been updated to automatically retry the import in case of this type of error; the bug fix was installed in the next server update a couple of days later.

One of the benefits of using the services of a smaller company is that they are able to turn on a sixpence, making quick changes and improvements in response to a customer’s needs – the kind of thing a larger company might take months to achieve, if at all, in spite of (or even because of) their much greater resources.