Scaling up service: Moving away from individual clients and personal service

As your client base starts to increase, or you start to move towards a SaaS (or similar) model, you will need to start considering how this will impact all areas of your business. 

Until now, you have been giving your clients or customers a personalised experience, keeping in regular contact with your first, or biggest, or highest paying client. Do you create features or processes just for them? Do they have favourable terms with you that you no longer offer to new customers? As you transition to a bigger pool of clients, you need to think about how to deal with those ‘old friends’ that have supported you until now.

Scaling-up service

Maintaining the personal touch with your original clients who helped you get started can get difficult. You don’t want to let them down, but at the same time, new customers need nurturing and impressing. As your new customer list expands, their balance of revenue often changes, making the original customers less important. 

You need to ensure that all your customers continue to feel valued. Finding solutions that help spread your customer support function as widely as possible, without impacting actual service. 

Gather data on your current processes

• Monitor how much time you are currently spending on your key clients. Are there ways you can reduce the time spent without compromising the service?

• Keep a note of the sort of things your key clients are coming to you with right now. This will give you an idea of the things your new customers will start asking. Get some FAQs ready to cover those questions an be proactive in answering them in your marketing and sales processes

• What are your processes for capturing feedback from your existing client base? If you rely on regular calls or in-person reviews, consider how you can build in more automated ways to start capturing feedback and feature requests in the future. You will need to strategically plan features that cater to the evolving needs of a wider audience

Product impact

• As your client base grows, you may need to adapt to a tiered service model (e.g. SaaS and Enterprise plans) to reflect differing needs and budgets

• Accommodating special arrangements for your original clients while implementing a new system can lead to technical debt (via legacy tech) - a balancing act that will careful planning and handling

People and Service

• Along with practical changes, consider dedicated roles for customer lifecycle management and marketing to streamline communication and support scalability

• Start stepping back little by little. Being the first big client is something many companies enjoy. They get great service, they get to mould a product or service to exactly how they want it and what suits their business. Moving them into a SaaS model where they will suddenly be at arm’s length can be harsh. Start slowly pulling away from them so you are still delivering the service, but not as attentive as before

• Be consistent in your processes and make it clear, internally, what level of service is acceptable for each tier of client. You may need to gently remind your teams that there are now processes to deal with feature requests or that any customer interaction should go through certain team members only from now on

Growth is a good problem to have

Unlike those first few, big clients, the impact of each new client may seem smaller. This doesn’t reflect their importance, but does necessitate a broader focus for your service. By proactively addressing potential issues, you can ensure a smooth transition and maintain a happy customer base.