| >>What did it take for you to get it to that point? Honestly, I just refused to run customer service like Comcast. I didn't want to contribute to what I think is one of the worst trends in business today. I didn't really care if it was good for the business or not. >>Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help? I worked for a year or so in call centers and I've worked a lot of crappy retail jobs in my life, so that was its own form of training I found very useful. As for technology, we use Help Scout, Google Voice, Acuity Scheduling, Stitch, and Agile CRM. I can't remember what we use for postage and printing labels... it's pretty decent though. Nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking. Our online shop is powered by WordPress and various plugins, which works pretty well and is funny to talk about here on Hacker News. Our warehouse manager reconfigured all of our USPS packaging and saved us a lot of money using various different types of flat rate based on zip code, that was a big cost savings with no impact to delivery time. That probably took the longest; getting logistics software to work well with our inventory management system and printing labels/postage properly. We did it by hand on USPS.com for months and managed inventory in Excel. But like anything else, you do it that way as a startup until it's too painful then you figure out a solution. |