A strong customer service strategy is not just a feel-good factor notionally but also makes good business sense — with enough supporting data to it.
Let us explore the importance of having a good customer service strategy. As in a funnel, the number of customers passing on to the next steps keeps reducing in every step refer above diagram. A company has to utilize its marketing budget judiciously to move a customer from awareness to the purchase phase. Companies want this value to be as low as possible. Ideally, this number has to be high.
Imagine all the efforts required for a mango tree to grow from the beginning. However, once it starts to give fruits, you want it to reap the benefits year after year and do not forget that the seeds from fruits can lead to further new trees — word-of-mouth marketing. So investing in good customer service increases customer experience which in turn increases customer loyalty and CLTV, resulting in better topline and bottom line.
Zappos has taken numerous actions to ensure the best customer service, a couple of interesting ones are listed here. The customers now do not have to worry about the fit, design, or comfort of the shoes and try out all the options at home.
This encourages people to leverage the advantages of online shopping and simultaneously removes the drawbacks. Zappos considers this customer service strategy as a marketing expense towards customer acquisition and the results are visible in the overall increase in the customer lifetime value. Zappos achieves this excellence in Customer Service by having a strong foundation system of Customer Loyalty Team, which ensures a smooth and hassle-free process.
The metrics used for the performance of this team are based on the value-added to the customer and the quality of interactions, which is opposite to the conventional practice measuring number of calls completed per shift. There is no script given or upselling attempt in these calls. In fact, Zappos has the record for the longest customer care call at 10 hrs 43 mins! This customer-centricity is extended throughout the Zappos website. They display the customer care numbers easily visible on every page instead of burying several layers or clicks below the surface.
They actually encourage customers to call their customer care numbers. They are confident that these are the touchpoints to create a positive experience for the customer leading to increased loyalty. As discussed in the previous section, the call center or the Customer Loyalty Team at Zappos is at the core of their business. It is not seen as just another supporting function or an operational department but is viewed as the most important team, which can greatly impact their customers.
They agreed that high-quality, empathetic customer care executives are essential to achieve this. This is the key philosophy that Zappos employs — and goes at lengths to ensure that each member of its call center team shares.
Zappos only wants people who really want to work for the company — everyone else can take the money and run. The purpose is to create a culture of happy and committed individuals that believe in the Zappos customer service philosophy. So we generally try to stay away from policies, we just ask our reps to do whatever they feel is the right thing to do for the customer and the company. We kind of have to untrain their bad habits.
Indeed, Zappos utilizes call center technology to track average call times per agent. This is a philosophy that has recently been taken to the extreme. Last June, a Zappos employee took a customer service call that lasted a record-breaking 10 hours and 43 minutes. Maybe, but such accusations perhaps miss the point of what Zappos is trying to achieve — loyalty.
In early our biggest problem was customer service—specifically, finding the right employees to staff our call center. We receive thousands of phone calls and e-mails every day, and we view each one as an opportunity to build the Zappos brand into being about the very best customer service.
Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us through word of mouth.
But that requires the right staff members—and our inability to find enough dedicated, high-caliber customer service reps near our San Francisco headquarters was turning into a huge problem. We initially considered outsourcing it to India or the Philippines, and we met with a few outsourcing companies.
We got the whole sales pitch and listened in on sample calls. You could tell on the ones from India that the people talking were from another country. How would they be able to help a customer who asked, say, for shoes like the ones Julia Roberts wears in Eat, Pray, Love? That system never worked very well. So we stopped drop shipping and began buying inventory from manufacturers, but we outsourced the warehousing and shipping to a separate company in Kentucky.
As an e-commerce company, we should have considered warehousing to be our core competency from the beginning. Trusting that a third party would care about our customers as much as we did was one of our biggest mistakes.
So we agreed that Zappos employees would staff the call center. But finding them in San Francisco remained a problem. One option would have been to set up a satellite call center, staffed by Zappos employees who were operating someplace far away. If we were serious about building our brand around being the best in customer service, customer service had to be the whole company, not just a single department.
We decided we needed to move our entire headquarters from San Francisco to wherever we built the call center, whose staff we had recently named the Customer Loyalty Team, or CLT. We talked about lower-cost cities where housing would be cheaper and there would be a bigger supply of workers who might think being a phone rep for a fun, growing company was a viable career choice. We did a lot of research into real estate, wages, and the cost of living in various cities, and we narrowed down the list of possibilities to Phoenix, Louisville, Portland Oregon , Des Moines, Sioux City, and Las Vegas.
Over lunch that afternoon at Chevys, we talked through our choices. Could the company afford the huge costs associated with moving its staff? How many of our employees would be willing to relocate to a new state? Would the potential upside be worth the disruption to our young company? What would be the best decision for our culture? In the United States we offer free shipping both ways to make transactions risk free and as easy as possible for our customers. The additional shipping costs are considerable for us, but we view them as a marketing expense.
We also offer a day returns policy for people who have trouble making up their minds. Originally our returns policy was only 30 days, but we kept increasing it at the urging of our customers, who became more loyal as we lengthened the returns period. Our customer service orientation is also apparent on our website. We take the exact opposite approach.
Looking at every one of our interactions through a branding lens instead of an expense-minimizing lens means that we run our call center very differently from others. Most call centers also have scripts and force their reps to try upselling to generate additional revenue.
We care only whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer. Timmy has a big fat wrist. Timmy need watch grande.
0コメント