Respond Right Away(The Fast-Response Paradox, and Why Early Founders Should Ignore It)
The faster you respond, the more your customers expect. Here is why I still reply right away.
An interesting paradox in sales or customer support is that the faster you respond to a customer's inquiry, the more they expect from you; not just in terms of response times in the future, which is true, but also they will feel like they have your attention on a whim.
(I'm sure anyone can relate to seeing a response from customer service and immediately feeling like you have the green light to send more requests.)
That customer instantly becomes a more demanding, time-intensive one, without offering any incremental revenue.
(In other words, lower LTV, aka a lower LTV:CAC, aka worse unit economics, aka good luck fundraising.)
So should you just be less responsive? Wait it out until the SLA threshold, or the standard "respond within 24 hours"? That feels like bad customer service, if not unethical.
Should you do something in between, like wait a few hours? (I can't help but analogize this to sleep training a baby, or applying "the pause," IYKYK.) This would "train" the customer to have lower expectations on response times.
I suspect there are all kinds of studies and best practices around this for the enterprise, but my perspective as an early startup operator is the following:
- Responding quickly is a signal that you give a crap. It creates a halo effect around reliability, trust, even the product roadmap, all good stuff.
- Sure, over time it's not sustainable for you to personally respond quickly to everything. But early customers are everything; what are you really optimizing for if not happy customers? A happy customer is leverage. It's also good for your own happiness.
- Sure, sure, you do need to focus at times, and maniacally checking your inbox (and Slack and WhatsApp and iMessage, and yeah, Clerk and Stripe) is not a productive way to work. You have to find your balance. But not checking, not replying quickly enough, is a mistake.
One thing worth acknowledging: time to resolution is ultimately more important than time to respond. Instantly replying to things and then taking three days to resolve them is bad.
TL;DR: respond right away. You haven't earned the right to optimize or play hard to get.
If you disagree, let me know. It's still early enough to save my unit economics…
Adapted from an original LinkedIn post.
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