April 27, 2007

An expanded view of customer service.

Our elevator pitch for Satisfaction, when people ask, is that we provide “People-powered customer service for absolutely everything.” More on the entire sentence soon enough, but for now let’s focus on the middle part: “customer service” and what that means.

When most people say customer service, what they’re really talking about is customer support. And customer support — those tedious minutes (or hours) spent listening to muzak while on hold with the phone company, or standing in line waiting to return something at a department store, or that email from the overnight shipping company explaining that the package was somehow mysteriously lost — is for the most part all the contact we have with the companies we do business with.

As Thor pointed out in his post on “Why Customer Service is the New Marketing,” companies often see customer service as an after-the-fact cost center — a post-sale, one-way transaction. And when that’s the case, it’s true that customer service does end up cast in a supporting role. But now we have the Web, and the Web is all about two-way communication. With the expanded voice the Internet affords people through blog posts, pod- and videocasts, discussion forums, even simple commenting, there’s a huge opportunity for companies and customers to expand the definition of “customer service” to include a whole lot more of the conversation going on around the things they sell.

When “customer service” goes two-way, it becomes about a whole lot more than just support. It becomes:

  • Community. Customers have a lot to say not just to companies but also to each other, and when companies pay attention they can learn a lot from what gets said. There’s a whole range of conversations people have about the things they use and love, and it’s much bigger than just the subset that’s directed to the company. Or to put it a little differently: you wouldn’t call up Levi’s to ask if you look good in a pair of their jeans, but you probably wouldn’t hesitate to ask your friend the same question. The Web can make everybody that friend.

    Companies create community when they encourage customers to interact with each other, facilitiating those conversations and participating where it makes sense. If you run a company that wants to connect with your customers in this way, recognize that your products and your customers have a life beyond their interactions with you and find ways to make that part of the culture of your organization.

  • Evangelism. When a company pays attention to the conversations its customers are having online, it quickly becomes clear which customers stand out as the most knowledgeable, the most helpful, the most committed, and the most passionate. Companies, these are your best customers. They care about what you make and do and have made you a part of their identity. Reach out to them! Find ways to connect with them and reward them for their participation — in other words, harness that enthusiasm to the benefit of all concerned. This really is the new marketing, because these customers are ground zero for genuine word-of-mouth promotion of your stuff.
  • Co-creation. Questions and problems are the standard currency of customer support, and there’s no doubt those are important, but there’s more to two-way customer service than just providing answers. People have ideas, too — ways that they use products that most companies could never have imagined. They mold them, change them, bend them, occasionally break them — in other words, use them as the basis for every kind of unpredictable invention.

    Seeing what customers do with their products freaks some companies out, but it shouldn’t, because this is customers telling companies what they want the company’s products to become. If you’re a company into the new marketing, you know that the more you embrace this approach, the better your business. Give customers the opportunity, and they’ll tell you what they want you to sell them! Find ways to bake customer co-creation into the development process for all or part of your product, as Jones Soda has done with the labels on its soda bottles, Fluevog has done with the design of some of its shoes, and Threadless has done with its entire business model. You’ll find that your customers become that much more communicative, evangelical, and committed to seeing you succeed, because now your success is their success, too.

By Lane Becker | Posted in community, customer service, new rules | Comments (2)
April 23, 2007

The Wisdom of Customer Crowds

This is one of my favorite customer service anecdotes right now, and I can’t seem to stop blabbing about it.

The story tells of how 30Boxes, an infectious social calendar app, abandoned conventional wisdom in their pursuit of extraordinary customer service. It’s a prime example of how embracing chaos can energize a business. (It was originally told to me by Nick Wilder of 30Boxes on my Customer Service is the New Marketing panel)

The Trouble with Trouble Tickets
Nick, along with serial entrepreneurs Narendra Rocherolle and Julie Davidson, started another company a few years ago, the photo-sharing site Webshots, ultimately acquired by CNET. As Webshots’ customer base and support issues began to scale up they did what every proper technology startup does; they installed trouble-ticket software to respond to all the customer issues. They anointed staff as official reps, established a process that worked with the software, and began to answer customers in this ostensibly optimal workflow.

Here’s the first plot twist: they discovered that almost fifty percent of the support issues coming in through that system went unresolved. Consistently. The remainder of the issues were sheperded through this siloed system by the staff, but were rarely viewed by the product developers or managers. Even with this efficiency-focused software, devoted support personnel, and the best of intentions Webshots was unable to rise to the goal of decent customer service.

Closing Issues by Opening Conversations
When the team launched their new startup, 30 Boxes, they decided to try something different. They opted out of trouble ticket systems altogether. Instead, they set up a forum. Just an old-fashioned discussion board, albeit one with a pretty, minimalist design. They didn’t publish an email form, and avoided any of those trumpeted CRM applications we read so much about. It was just a standard open source forum that anyone could post to.

This time the results were dramatically different. Right away users began to post questions, bugs, product ideas, company praise, and whatever else was on their minds. All this interaction from customers and the company was public, not hidden away in a private database like before, and each day the vibrant interactions pulled even more users into the conversation. All this hubbub created interest and involvement, stoking the passions of the customer community.

Now here’s the second plot twist: Instead of half of customer issues withering away unresolved in a trouble ticket system, on the 30Boxes forum almost 50% of customer issues were resolved by other users! Of the remaining issues, the vast majority were handled quickly by the 30Boxes product team which monitors the forum closely, not as their job, but because they’re eager for user feedback. And the biggest pain point of any customer service system–answering the same questions over and over again–mostly vanished now that all answers were posted publicly instead of sent to a private email inbox.

Just like magic.

New Rule: Wherever you can, keep your conversations with customers public

By Thor Muller | Posted in Tips and tricks, case studies, new rules, philosophy | Comments (6)
April 12, 2007

New Rule: Don’t Sue Your Customers

This is the tale of a pile-on. And by that I mean a lot of other bloggers and such are writing about the same thing. As compelling as the original is, though, the pile-on is the real story. Let’s start with my favorite quote from the whole affair, courtesy of Say Uncle:

“Don’t send bloggers stuff that makes you look like an asshat. They tend to blog about it.”

It all started when an out-of-work man and his wife, Katherine Coble, were intimidated and manipulated by a job search company called JL Kirk and Associates. Katherine describes how the company lures unemployed folk into their offices and uses high pressure sales tactics to squeeze money out of them, in exchange for “representing” them to potential employers. It sounds to me like a terrible deal–job-seekers are asked to shell out thousands of non-refundable dollars up front to *maybe* get some job leads.

Katherine blogged their bad experience, and her post quickly appeared at the top of Google’s search results for JL Kirk. Being so publicly unmasked must have freaked out JL Kirk, as bad press would scare any of us. But as we keep demonstrating on this blog, the ways in which a company engages with disgruntled customers makes all the difference in the world.

JL Kirk went the Darth Vader route. They had their lawyer, King & Ballow, send a fearsome letter demanding she “take down the blog entry…together with entire thread of comments.” They accused her of defamation and “tortuous interference,” and threatened her with monetary damages if she doesn’t comply with their demands by April 13. Confronted by a pissed off customer, their instinct was to actually crank up, WAY UP, the intimidation that Katherine had already described.

This was rocket fuel on a campfire. Within a few hours there were dozens of blog posts amplifying and repeating the whole scenario, including this one by superstar blogger Instapundit. Several others have mirrored her blog posts. The original post, already the seventh most prominent link on a Google search for the company, and referencing articles will likely grow far more visible thanks to all the incoming links and repetition. I’m happy to pile on, because this brutish attempt to shut down a person’s freedom of expression is an attack on all of us. It’s worth pointing out that the EFF, one of our favorite non-profits, exists to help combat just this kind of abuse.

Ironically, they’ve undermined their own ability to smother this issue. As Bill Hobbs writes: “The entire contents of the original post and all subsequent posts have become items of news interest…That’s not good news for King & Ballow or JL Kirk Associates because it means that I and the rest of the world’s 71 million bloggers are perfectly free to republish them in their entirety in the course of reporting on this story.”

It’s sad to see this behavior on a day when I had an overwhelmingly positive customer experience on this blog. Mere hours after describing an accidentally offensive automated email from Geni, an uber-cool genealogy app, the company had responded apologetically. They saw my public airing of the misfire as an opportunity to show they cared enough about my experience to reply personally. Now that’s a company that gets it.

It goes without saying that JL Kirk and Associates is a member of the Hall of Shame.

By Thor Muller | Posted in hall of shame, new rules | Comments (8)
April 4, 2007

How to run a call center that doesn’t suck

zappos.gifAgainst all odds Zappos has emerged as one of the most revered online retailers, almost solely thanks to its unusual approach to customers. Their CEO Tony Hsieh is crystal clear on their philosophy of customer service: every interaction is a branding opportunity. The message is that the sales and post-sales activities are of equal importance. His company puts their toll-free number in the upper left-hand corner of every page, above the logo, promising 24/7 response. And its repeated all over the site. They’re practically begging us to call them.

Of course, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom for an e-commerce company. After all, customer calls are one of the biggest enemies of ye olde profit margin. In fact, the standard call center thesis may well be “every interaction is a cost to be avoided.” Why would any smart businessperson actually encourage customers to get in touch?

But this is just the beginning for Zappos. Because really, lots of companies display a support number, even if they don’t advertise it like a clearance sale. It’s usually just an invitation to phone tree hell. At Zappos, if you call you’re in for a surprise…starting with zero wait time. More importantly, you’re going to have a warm, personal conversation with someone who knows the finer details of the giant catalog of products. Many customers who’ve been through it say the experience is unlike anything they’ve experienced outside of a family run boutique.

How do they do it? They start by banning all scripts, the building block of a more traditional call center. Because Zappos knows that if they forced their service reps to live by a script they implicitly distrust them to operate without one. Zappos service is anything but automated. As their tagline puts it, they are “Powered by Service.” This commitment means letting their front-line people use their good judgement and–gasp!–their genuine personalities to engage with customers. Phone staff can do and say whatever they need to in the process of delivering satisfaction, whether that means giving away free overnight shipping or reading site content out loud to sight impaired customers.

They elevate the role of customer service to something so valuable that every manager in the company must participate:

…Every new employee that we hire in our corporate office is required to go through 4 weeks of Customer Loyalty training (answering phones in our call center) before starting the actual job that he/she was actually hired for. To us, customer service isn’t just a department — it is the entire company.

Given the incredible leeway they extend to their staff, it’s no wonder that Zappos avoids all the traditional metrics for success. The most important of these metrics is time per call, a number that by the sheer fact of its collection would undermine the mandate to do “whatever it takes” to woo people at all stages of customerhood. Zappos management opts instead for trust, occasionally listening in on calls, but generally focused on the broader measurement of satisfaction (98% positive according to BizRate) and return business.

The result is that Zappos is creating some of the most passionate customers of any online retailer. These customers are incredibly vocal, and the company’s projected 2007 annual sales of $800 million can be credited largely to the word-of-mouth their amazing service inspires. This earns them a seat of honor in our Hall of Fame.

passion_chart.png
Zappos reminds us that companies that embrace customer interactions create evangelists for their cause. It’s not that reaching this coveted place where engagement and passionate fervor meet is so hard or expensive–it may in fact be the cheaper and easier path in the long run. But as we’ve seen, it does require relinquishing control to the chaos of real human interactions. That is revolution for most companies.

NEW RULE #1: No scripts for customer service
NEW RULE #2: Eliminate average call length as a measure of success

By Thor Muller | Posted in Tips and tricks, case studies, customer service, hall of fame, new rules | Comments (1)
February 28, 2007

Be opinionated, dammit

WaiterToday’s New Rule for Customer Service is…be opinionated. In any relationship nothing breeds trust like “being real,” and this is never truer than when people aren’t expecting it, such as in the cruel world of commerce. This means that sometimes the best way to build a lasting customer relationship is to talk smack about your own product–when it’s deserved. By drawing attention to the bad as well as the good you demonstrate that you and your customers are in this together. In the past week we’ve seen this work well for Jetblue (admitting to terrible follow-through), New Balance (dissing its apparel business) and 37Signals (critiquing flaws in Campfire’s design).

This works even better with everyday customer interactions. When I eat out at restaurants I like to ask the wait staff about their favorite dish on the menu. I can often predict the quality of a meal based on the strength of the waiter’s opinions. A good restaurant will give its staff lots of opportunities to sample its food. It wants its servers to know not just the culinary factoids about tonight’s unpronouncably gourmet dish, but also how it tastes, its mouth feel, what else it’s like. Not just which wine should be paired with the dish, but why.

And I’m far more likely to trust a waiter, and the restaurant by extension, if he also talks about what he doesn’t like. Though it is counter-intuitive, it gives me real comfort when I order to know that some dishes aren’t as good as others. Similarly, I spend more money at clothing stores where the salesclerk tells me when something’s not looking so hot on me. I trust them when they give me the thumbs up on something else.

Now think about the customer service interactions that fail–insurance companies, phone companies, PC-makers. These are organizations that have no place for opinions, nor the passionate involvement of their staffs. They actually provide scripts designed to protect against such things.

As people we share opinions when we genuinely care–care about the subject we’re discussing and those we’re sharing with. So it’s natural that the wait staff at great restaurants tend to be foodies themselves. Successful boutique workers are fashionistas. We can see that being opinionated is ultimately tied to who we are. We can’t fake it, at least very well. That’s what makes being opinionated so special, and why it’s today’s New Rule.

By Thor Muller | Posted in customer service, hospitality, new rules, philosophy | Comments (0)