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Customer service is often overlooked because the value is not immediately obvious. Tying them to the business model to justify cost and making it part of the company’s culture are two good ways to make them more of a priority.

Two more areas for support to play a big role are in product development and sales. Surfacing the biggest bug and the most common feature request is core to customer service, and taking inbound calls for support and then cross-selling / up-selling them different products / services transforms customer service to a revenue generating part of the company. Then it’s immediately obvious.

I know I would be willing to pay in may circumstances. Maybe theres a business in that alone.

As the behavioral psychologist at Thrive (www.justthrive.com), our customer service approach was one of my first tasks when I was brought onboard. How could we do more, I was asked, than just make people happy – how can we make them truly satisfied?

It takes a bit to appreciate the distinction. Happiness is transitory, a little moment of delight, but it doesn’t last – it isn’t deep down belly shaking and it doesn’t tend to persist. Satisfaction, on the other hand, may not peak as high but what it trades for the peak, it gets on duration.

Here are a couple of things we came up with to try to build satisfaction.

1) Be personal and personable. There is the rare person who will wish that you were more formal with them, and it is your job to pick up on who those people are going to be. Everyone else? Be yourself, speak in a way that understandable. If you have to use scripted language for scaling and precision, do it, but use it only when necessary – don’t script out the whole letter, just the parts that need to stay the same. Typing out the name of the customer connects you to them and creates a bond that makes it easier to honor.

2) Back your CS people. I have a standing policy here: if you have an abusive customer, don’t take it sitting down and after trying to help, send them direct to me – I’ll do my best to help them, but I’ll also tell them that we don’t allow abuse of our support folks and that they’ll be going direct to me from now on. Most of them immediately apologize and those that don’t aren’t going to be good users in the long term.

3) Competency is everything. If you study customer satisfaction experimentally, you find that tone matters, hence Rule Number 1. But the ultimate thing that generates satisfaction is actually getting something done: people need to see action and their problems need to get solved. It may take time, they may have to be patient, but if the problem is really a problem, get it solved. Tell them what you’re going to do, how you’re going to do it, set reasonable expectations, and then deliver on it. “Here is what I’m going to do” is the most powerful tool in the CS arsenal.

4) Be visible. We sign all our emails with our pictures. We use our real name. We have bios up. Our number is at the bottom of the page. Persistent help box. Why on earth would you want to discourage someone looking for help? It may help your bottom line, but if you’re in business for the bottom line, why the hell are you in business?

/rant

Southwest Airlines stock symbol is LUV after all and they have big hearts on the bulkhead walls in their planes so every single passenger can see it while flying.

Zappos was doing customer service so well that Amazon, a leading online marketplace was willing to toss out $1B+ for them even though to date they were really only selling shoes.

I think the real takeaway of this article isn’t discussed much by Andrew but that’s fine. I’ll provide some of my thoughts below.

The real challenge as Andrew identified is SCALING the WOW (or LOVE) customer experience as a company grows. It’s easier in the early days because it’s simply easier to convey this value to a core team of 5 employees who all sit within arms-length of each other. It’s also more relevant to them because they are typically more incentivized in the long term success of the startup. They see the first revenue begin to come in and they understand why those customers are paying. They’ve probably even talked to many of the customers face-to-face.

As a company grows, the reason that employees internalize for providing great customer service is different than in the early glory days. It has more to do with being “the right thing” and providing for a “great place to work” in which the employee is more satisfied because they communicate with more happy customers than upset customers.

I’m not trying to debate the reasons to provide great customer service but instead trying to dig into how companies should message their customer service goals and values to their employees. Sort of an answer to the “what’s in it for me?” question that is common from employees in growing companies. Not every employee is a long term fully-invested employee unfortunately… even if they have equity.

I think great customer service in growing organizations comes from two critical practices:

1) Building the cost of amazing customer service into the business model:

There’s a reason why Zappos shoes are more expensive than the rest and great customer service is the reason why most people don’t care. Customers won’t, and really shouldn’t have to, make a cost trade-off decision in favor of paying separately for customer service. For years software companies have sold customer service as an add-on package. In fact, in the open source software world, customer service is the only thing that can be sold.

As the Internet is providing more visibility (first blogs, then Facebook, now Twitter) into the customer service practices of every company the bar is being lifted. Companies that don’t budget for customer service find their customer service goals in direct competition with their financial goals. You can’t let it get this far.

You must build the cost into your business model as soon as you can. Zappos knows that X % of customers will return Y dollars worth of shoes within their 12 month no-questions-asked return period so they can mark up the cost of every shoe by the right amount. So, when customer Z returns a pair of shoes with the soles worn through 11 months and 29 days after buying them because “they never fit right in the first place” you can just get a good laugh out of it. You get the benefit of providing a positive customer experience with no unplanned negative to the bottom line (ie: you already budgeted for this). Then, as a company grows these averages become more accurate (more statistically significant base) and lower risk (more profit to allow for padding incorrect assumptions).

For companies that follow this practice the cost and risk of providing excellent customer service decreases as they increase in size.

2) Obsessive communication and re-communication:

Executives in growing companies must be obsessed about customer experience and must let their teams understand their obsession. It must be repeated time and time again. Execs must clearly communicate the reasons WHY the best customer service is important to the customer, the company, and each employee. And they must use properly customized messaging when they talk with each audience.

Finally, they must build this communication into their daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings and employee training so it never falls by the wayside and remains an inescapable theme.

For companies that follow this practice bad apple employees quit on their own (or never apply in the first place) because if you like being mean to customers you’re really going to hate life in this type of company.

Focusing on building a solid support site and customer service/support team over the years has been integral to Articulate’s success.

In fact, we at Articulate are often told things like this: “You guys set the gold standard for tech support.”

A couple articles from my blog on the topic:

Commitment to the Customer: 7 Ways We Support Your Success

Articulate Named Customer Service Department of the Year

Somewhat off topic, but Brand Tags is another interesting way to see what people are thinking about brands.