Make customer service redundant

Glenda Stone will not forget that it happened at night. At midnight that day, she was sleeping in her room when she was awakened by the music ringing of the pager beside the bed. Looking up at the clock, she knew that some customer must be having trouble. Stone grabbed the phone and checked the voicemail, and sure enough, a customer had left a message. He was so panicked that he couldn't say a word. Stone called him right away.

"It doesn't matter, sir, just calm down," she remembers trying to comfort him. But the man roared on the other end of the phone: "Do you hear me? My room hasn't been installed yet!"

Stone's company is called RMR (Relocation Management Resources Inc.), which specializes in serving those who travel to other places. Companies that send employees to relocate household items for their employees. Without further ado, she immediately logged into the company's computer network and learned that the customer had only brought simple luggage, was staying at the hotel, and was still waiting for other items to be delivered to his newly moved apartment. But the problem is, the door to the apartment has not been fixed.

"Don't worry," Stone told him, "we'll stop moving immediately." After settling the customer, she stopped the moving truck as the clock pointed to 1 a.m. The task was completed and everything returned to calm, but she had no sleep at all. "Take a shower and work," she said to herself.

Stone's workday usually starts at 5 a.m., and she is one of RMR's customer service employees who help customers solve problems. The company's most important principle is that at least one person is on duty at all times. This reflects the company's commitment to customer service at the heart of its business strategy.

We've entered a new era of customer service winning where even small businesses can't sleep. There are no unreasonable customer requirements, only poor service. This philosophy is especially evident in competitive businesses such as RMR. In order to revolutionize the quality of customer service, corporate decision makers are looking for ways to find new ways, the most obvious of which is the so-called "24 hours a day, 7 days a week service", human contact, real-time feedback and proactive attack. Let’s take 4 companies as examples to see how they are actively applying these strategies with remarkable results.

Destroying Customer Service: Thinking ahead of time

Knowing what the customer is really thinking is a revolutionary development. But in customer service, no one can be more aggressive than Proflowers.com CEO Bill Strauss. He is dismissive of raising the quality of the company's customer service to a certain level, and wants to eradicate the need for customer service at the source.

Strauss was previously Intruit's Vice President of Customer Support and Operations. This is a financial software company known for putting great effort into making its software intuitive, so "customer support" is superfluous. Strauss says that after five years at Intruit, a "zero patience" attitude that never tolerates any flaws has been ingrained into his character. He joined Proflowers.com, which sells flowers online, as soon as it was founded, hoping to transfer what he had learned to improve customer service.

As soon as Strauss joined the company, he set about checking out customer service. After placing an order, customers always call to inquire about the order status: Have the flowers been delivered? From the start, he got the company moving, with 3 automated emails sent to customers for every transaction. The first is a standard action on many websites today, which is to receive an order confirmation email when a customer places an order. When the goods are loaded onto the delivery truck, this information is transmitted to the company website, which automatically emails the information to the customer. The most extreme is the third email, the information the customer receives may be: the purchased flowers have been received at 11 am and signed by so-and-so. Strauss said the third email itself reduces the chances of a customer calling, which is proactive. He continued, "It's nice to handle customer inquiries well, but it's passive behavior."

Strauss is a strong advocate of proactive customer service, but he's not a loner. CEOs are talking about this. "If we understand why customers are calling," Strauss said, "then we can find ways to improve our website, marketing campaigns and ordering process, no reason not to call them."

For example Example: Rose prices are bound to skyrocket before Valentine's Day, and Proflowers is forced to pass this on to customers. Strauss could of course imagine that thousands of customers would be flooded with complaints. So the company decided, as before, to nip these phones in the bud. How to do it? The company sends an e-mail every January to notify customers of the upcoming price increase and invites them to pre-order flowers at a lower price.

24/7: More than a Machine's Mission Stratis Morfogen) never bothered about it. In his view, it is not a question of whether to do it, but a question of how to do it well. "Online retailing is 24/7, and so should customer service. Otherwise, it's like a 7-11 store that opens from midnight to 7 a.m. without a waiter."

This does not mean Mo Fugan wants to start a high-end online fish retail business. His original facility was as simple as New York's original wholesale fish market. The company's 100,000-square-foot warehouse is just a 10-minute drive from the wholesale fish market on Fulton Street, which is where the company's name Fulton Street comes from. Morfogan has spent many mornings here since he was 4 years old. He helps his father, who owns a restaurant, pick a large selection of lobster, oyster and salmon from the stall. When the company started, the warehouse was like a big hole filled with boxes and freezers full of lobsters. This reflects Morfogan's principle of doing things: think big in planning and save money in operation.

24/7 service wasn't always there. When the company was founded, there were only two people. Apart from him, the other was Tony Psaltis, a childhood friend who had been engaged in foreign service. At the company, they were both responsible for every detail, including answering customer calls and emails. When business picked up, Morfogan rented a call center that specialized in CD-ROM and book sales, and was responsible for the company's customer service. This turned out to be a big mistake, and they eventually found that they needed an expert to answer specific questions, such as how to keep live lobsters. So Posarts became the company's director of customer service and hired several employees to answer the phone. Two years after the company opened, Morfogan has fulfilled the promise he made when he opened: At any given time, there is always an employee answering customer calls. Today the customer service department consists of five full-time or part-time employees who take turns working the night shift, with Morfogan and Psatus occasionally working late nights or on weekends.

Although the company received few calls after 10 p.m., Morfogan felt the 24/7 service was worth the money, as most calls brought in orders that averaged $200. "Customer service is an important step in getting a business done," he said. "If it was just a question-answering machine, we wouldn't be able to do business at night."

Human Contact: Tackling Sensitive Reception

At ScriptSave, no one answers the phone after hours. But during office hours, anyone who calls in will hear not an automated voice answer, but a real person answering.

Technically, ScriptSave's customers are not individuals but health insurance companies, including BlueCross, which provides members with prescription drug benefits. These insurers hire ScriptSave to explain to their members the benefits of prescription drug coverage.

At the opening of ScriptSave, CEO Charlie Horn had a somersault dealing with customer service. Horn, a former marketing manager and sales agent for an insurance company, wanted to set up a system at ScriptSave that would make it easy to explain programs about prescription drugs to members. Horn knew that the calls were made by cardholders over the age of 65 who wanted individual service that machines couldn't provide.

Horn made the mistake of outsourcing customer service to a call center initially. He said he was "confused" about whether customers were being served well. Two years after the company opened, he set up his own customer service department, and the company decided to maximize personal contact with customers seeking help. "We found that if we wanted to do it well, we had to do it ourselves."

Today, even simple questions like how to open a prescription drug card are answered in real time by ScriptSave's customer service staff. Why bother yourself? The answer speaks for itself. Horn tried his best to find opportunities to chat with clients—customers of clients—to be precise.

To make the chat effective, the company also trains its employees. The company emphasizes that all new employees must undergo a three-week training period before receiving the first consultation call. In addition, the company's 35 customer service assistants receive 60 hours of training each year in classrooms. New employees need to understand basic phone etiquette first, and then learn about the customer's gender, age, preferences, and other characteristics. New employees take advanced seminars on "sensitive reception," learning how to deal with telephone customers who have hearing problems or who can't read prescriptions.

Unlike most call centers, ScriptSave does not limit the length of time a customer can consult. Horn recalled that an old lady called the company recently because her husband suddenly fell. The operator called back to track the progress of the matter, and the old lady immediately sent an email to thank the company for this extra service. "We're not doing a show," Horn says. "It's just our principles." Of course, maintaining customer satisfaction is the company's biggest focus.

Leveraging Real-Time Feedback: Opinions More Than Scores

John and Amy Howard were on thin ice when they started Carrot's Ink Cartridges. They know that their ink cartridge products are obscure and that their business depends on service. Now the Howards don't have to worry about the company's service level anymore. They receive a free real-time survey report from BizRate, a professional online business survey company, via email every day.

During the course of the survey, BizRate will email Carrot's customers two survey forms for them to fill out. One questionnaire is issued when the customer purchases the product, and the other when the product is shipped. Customers who take part in the survey will be given an online raffle ticket or other chance to win cash. Each questionnaire has 10 items, covering things like customer service. The Howards were pleasantly surprised by the high level of customer participation in filling out the form, with feedback rates averaging 20 percent, sometimes as high as 35 percent. BizRate aggregates customer ratings for Carrot's, analyzes it, and submits a confidential report to the Howards.

On a most iconic day recently, Carrot's ranked among the top merchants served by BizRate with an overall score of 9.3. Feedback directly from customers is just as pertinent as their ratings. "The opinions are more important than the scores," says John Howard, because real-time information helps the company correct mistakes quickly and systematically. Since its inception, the company's sales have climbed to $2 million, thanks to the survey system.

Knowing your company's image from your customers is a breakthrough in customer service. Consultant Patricia Seybold points out that collecting client surveys once a year is not comparable in quality to information that is obtained in near real-time. But she added that doesn't mean that every time a customer calls or emails, they have to fill out a small "5-point comment form". She suggested that companies can start by surveying a certain number of customers each week and gradually develop customer surveys.

Originally adapted from Fanatics by Susan Greco in the April 2001 issue of Inc. Magazine with permission! An article copyrighted by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate in 2001. Translated by Li Qingkang.