Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (18 page)

To quote Mark Penn (the formidable pollster known best for identifying the emergence of the ‘‘soccer mom’’ demographic trend) on the subject:

Be careful before you accept the conventional wisdom that Americans can’t concentrate, that we are too distractible for sustained narrative, and that political office always goes to the candidate with the cleverest tag line. In fact, a sizable number of us—often the most interested key decision makers—will listen for as long as you can talk, read for as long as you can write, and follow for as long as you are willing to explain something.
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Like Penn, you may have noticed a diversity of reading styles and attention spans among your customers. With the capabilities of the Web, you no longer need to impose a single writing style on, or suppose a single reading style for, all of your customers. You can let different customers choose what works for them. The ‘‘short copy’’ will, of course, be what you put up front: a brief product or service description and pricing. As this may be all that many customers need, they won’t be slowed down by any minutiae. Other customers can click on a

‘‘learn more’’ button for a few paragraphs of additional insight. But don’t necessarily stop there: Why not include ‘‘white papers’’ or other background material you have available for those customers or prospects who want to do more thorough research on your offering? On the Web, with good design these additional resources do not need to add significantly to the clutter of your layout.

Online, the Window in Which to Show You’re

Extraordinary Can Be Small

The Internet makes it relatively easy for companies with no tradition of good service to provide at least
tolerable
service—by buying or building Building Customer Loyalty Online

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a highly usable web interface and battle-testing it regularly. While this is good for consumers, it presents a dilemma for us: If tolerable self-service is becoming widely available, how do we distinguish ourselves online?

In large part, by augmenting technology with direct, loyalty-building care and attention.

The Finishing Touch for ‘‘Perfect’’

Websites: Human Contact

Netflix, as we touched on in Chapter Six, boasts a superbly designed online self-service system that makes ‘‘perfect purchasing’’—lending, actually—possible, generally without any human interaction at all. Nonetheless, the bottom line is that in a competitive market in which perfect products are emerging all around you, it’s not enough to offer a perfect online experience.

To develop customer loyalty, you must
also
provide outstanding human-to-human touch points, whenever they may be called for.

To this end, Netflix not too long ago decided to buck the trend of trying to minimize service costs: It actually set for itself the goal of providing far more human-to-human contact, any time a customer seemed to be looking for it, than its competitors do. They did away with Internet-based customer service responses altogether, instead displaying their 1–800 service number prominently on their site, and they refused to farm out any of those telephone service jobs to subcontractors overseas. Rather, they built a massive new telephone customer service center in the greater Portland, Oregon, area. Portland was picked specifically as a trait-based hiring move: In encounters with the existing Portland work force, Netflix executives had discovered an unusually high proportion of people with great customer service traits such as ‘‘politeness and empathy’
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already located there.

Search for automated and human-powered ways to provide personal attention to your most needy online customers:

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1.
Encourage personal interactions at every juncture for customers who may
desire them—no matter how ‘‘perfect’’ your site seems without them.
Provide live chat buttons on every page. Post your toll-free service number prominently, and keep the line open as far into the night as you can effectively staff it. Provide an ‘‘urgent email’’ button. (As we’ve mentioned, some people prefer to correspond by email, and for people with disabilities it is often the best option.)

2.
Design the elements of your site with sensitivity, so you don’t exclude
any of your customers.
Customers with disabilities, ranging from subtle to daunting, are at least as active online as they are in the physical world.

There are specific ways to make your site more widely usable to these customers that you should be sure to follow. For example, each fancy graphic element on your site should have an ‘‘alt’’ tag (similar to a caption) that can be read by a text reader, so that you can serve customers with visual impairments. More broadly, older customers are rapidly becoming more comfortable online, and yet many sites look like they’re still being designed exclusively for twenty-somethings, with tiny buttons and confusing layouts. If there’s somewhere you want someone to click, make it obvious. This is the Internet version of being sensitive to the ‘‘pace’’ of your customers.

3.
Make the self-service elements of your site fun and interesting.
Self service can be engaging too. Think about comedian Demetri Martin’s idea for a coin change-making machine that behaves like a slot machine: Bells ring and lights flash, just as though you’ve struck the jackpot—even though you still get back the same amount of money you put in.

Incorporate that vision into how you think about designing self service, and you’ll never think it has to be a dull experience for your customers again.

4.
Make any automated correspondence you use more engaging, personable,
and, if appropriate, funny.
If you use automated follow-up emails, consider a lighthearted approach, perhaps like the follow-ups Micah resorted to during understaffed periods in the early years: Building Customer Loyalty Online

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Hi! This is your friendly robotic follow up (sorry about that, but almost everything else about Oasis is 100 percent personal, so if you hit ‘‘reply’’, you’ll get a real human being immediately, so you can bond with someone of your own

species.) . . .

CD Baby, a sister company to Oasis, uses even the smallest of opportunities to show how personable they are: They turned the email confirmation that lets you know a CD has shipped into friendly, campy comedy. Their whimsical email helps buyers realize that this company is different—that it’s staffed by people whose priority is being creative, joyful human beings just like themselves:

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs

and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office, where the entire town of Portland waved ‘‘Bon Voyage!’’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, April 6th!
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‘‘I made no haste in my work,’’ declared Thoreau in
Walden
, ‘‘but rather made the most of it.’’
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Haste seemed like a clear negative in Thoreau’s world. But what about in ours? In a sense, our customers
want
us to make haste: They want us to generate great results with a minimum of their time and effort. Meanwhile, we strive to bind our customers to our brands—largely by making the very most of each en-

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counter with them. We need to lavish time and attention on them to help the attachment process along. To reconcile these goals, do what CD Baby has done with a simple shipping alert: Design each online step to get the most positive human connection out of it that you can—without slowing down or inconveniencing your customers.

Online, the Golden Rule Is Permission

For a decade, Seth Godin has been drawing attention to the concept of ‘‘permission marketing,’’ which he defines as the privilege of delivering
anticipated, personal, relevant messages to people
who actually want to get them
. Seth emphasizes that treating people respectfully is the best way to earn their attention. In his worldview, when people choose to
pay
attention, they actually are paying you—giving something valuable to you. Once they’ve spent some amount of attention on you, it’s lost to them forever.

So Seth emphasizes that we must think about a customer’s attention as an important asset—something to be respected and valued by us, not wasted. Meaningful permission is different from technical or legal permission:

Just because you somehow get my email address doesn’t mean
you have permission. Just because I don’t complain doesn’t
mean you have permission. Just because it’s in the fine print
of your privacy policy doesn’t mean it’s permission either. Real
permission works like this: If you stop [contacting them], people
complain, they ask where you went
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Jonathan Coulton, an Internet indie-music phenomenon, can email nearly any customer who buys one of his CDs or MP3

downloads online and have them be happy to hear from him.

Coulton has real
permission
to contact his fans—they
want
to hear from him. But what if your company sells someone a replacement cell phone charger through Amazon Marketplace? It’s Building Customer Loyalty Online

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a lot touchier: Odds are good your customers are not obsessive cell phone charger fans. You almost certainly don’t have their real permission to flood their in-boxes. Your messages are unlikely to be anticipated, personal, or relevant.

Amazon.com: A Brilliant Company, but Not the Most

Realistic Model to Emulate

In online commerce, there’s Amazon.com and then there’s everyone else.

Amazon’s astonishing ability to create loyal customers is a wonderful and enviable thing to behold—but it’s not a directly replicable model for the rest of us in business. Amazon’s success is based at least in part on a much riskier and more expensive approach to loyalty than our anticipatory service model: an incredibly well executed version of the
repetition
strategy. Get the basics of satisfactory service exactly right and then repeat the customer’s exposure until loyalty occurs. The repetitions in Amazon’s case come fast and furious, because their perfect product eliminates friction like nobody else can.

Here are just a very few examples of Amazon’s friction-free service:

? Your credit card is stored in its entirety for your convenience. (In fact, if you ever need to register a new credit card, Amazon doesn’t even make you
flip the card over
to find and input the security code.) What’s more, you can choose ‘‘one click’’ purchasing and make an entire purchase without re-entering, re-selecting, or re-considering anything: type of payment, delivery address, billing address, or method of shipment. All in all, there is almost nothing payment-wise to interfere between your brain desiring to make a purchase and your ability to instantly do so.

? Your order is transmitted instantly to the shipper, often UPS in Lexington, Kentucky. This makes it possible to order well into the eve-

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ning and—in a pinch—receive that item early the next morning with nearly 100 percent accuracy.

? Amazon can help direct you to precisely the right product for you, thanks to its unparalleled use of the power of customer rankings from its millions of customers.

Amazon has a unique combination of attributes that are probably not realistic goals for most of us: being first; being huge; having abnor-mally deep pockets. For example, Amazon’s packages can be transported to customers more quickly and cheaply than competitors’

products because leading carriers will agree to almost anything to get Amazon’s
extraordinarily
high-volume shipping contracts. Furthermore, Amazon’s near-monopoly gives it the freedom to let customers post critical comments about merchants’ products without losing any good merchants (for good merchants, it’s much more profitable to stay on Amazon and take their critical lumps on a few products). To create a friction-free payment and account experience, Amazon had to spend unknown amounts of money developing extremely strong, often pro-prietary, and always obsessively enforced security strategies (their Chief Technology Officer hints that Amazon makes internal use of ‘‘a group of hackers whose goal in life it is to break
into’’8
their system, thus proving its strength). It’s only through the very expensive efforts of some of the top programmers and security experts in the world that Amazon has been able to deliver a friction-free Web experience
and
deliver extreme account security.

Amazon is also powerful enough and perfect enough to deemphasize human-to-human customer service on a day to day basis. In a crisis you may be able to reach a fantastic employee at Amazon (we absolutely have), but it’s just as likely that you will be affronted by someone with limited people skills deploying a form letter when you’re frustrated and irate (that’s happened to us, too, more than once). You may get away with that for a while, probably a long while, if you’re a near-monopoly delivering the most perfect product in the world. But all others—the rest of us—need to strive instead for a consistently superb human touch.

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While there’s always something to learn from this brilliant merchant, (including how to build a truly ‘‘perfect product’’ and how to keep up and keep improving upon such a high standard for self service), overall Amazon.com is not the most realistic model for most of us. In most industries, it’s not realistic to aspire to a catalog as extensive as Amazon’s or an online experience that is as friction-free. (Or to working on such a scale: We’ll wager you’re not going to be selling and shipping a reputed 2.5 Nintendo Wiis
per minute
.)
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