This morning, I read an HBR blog post with a similar title, in which a company outlines the specific steps taken to make prospective customers feel absolutely valued and therefore more likely to make a sale. These steps include picking them up from the airport, having them meet top people in your company, and treating their visit as the most important event on the day’s schedule (not to mention paying all the expenses for their trip). These are all great ideas, but an important questions is left:

What do you do if you’re an internet company, and more importantly, a small business with limited resources?

1) Be yourself. Unlike huge corporations, startups can get away with (and are encouraged) to infuse their customer service interactions with personality and a sense of their corporate culture. There’s no need to use stuffy corporate lingo when interacting with customers, in fact, it will make you seem fake and pretentious.

2) Use as many mediums as possible. Making livechat available on your site, emailing customers, calling them, or even meeting when possible are all ways that even an internet company can offer support. We offer livechat on FeeFighters, and I’ve gotten to know many potential customers simply by actively responding to their needs and questions. We also call or email to follow up with our users, and more often than not, when approached in a friendly manner, people are very responsive.

3) Take an interest in your users. Before I contact any of our users, I do research about their companies and achievements. It dramatically increased our response rate when we reached out to users not with a preplanned script, but an idea of what their needs would be and a personal approach to help them. Doing this not only helps you understand your customers better, but it makes your customers really feel like you are on their side and have their best interests at heart.