| >>Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot? I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc. Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong. The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it). In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc. It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is. EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost. |
There is one notable exception, and they seem to be destroying their competition. Scaling doesn't appear to be a problem either. Amazon are doing pretty well. Bezos is known to indoctrinate his employees with a few strong principles, and customer obsession is #1.