Turning Customers into Advocates

There are a lot of good companies, maybe even great companies with crappy customer service. But good customer service can help make a crappy company a good one. Years ago, I heard stories about Nordstroms wonderful customer service, how supposedly they had let a customer return a tire to the store. One of my friends tested the return policy by taking back a pair of used shoes. The sales associate refunded the purchase price of the shoes (but made it clear to my friend that he was taking advantage of the system). I don’t think good customer service requires that you let people take advantage of you, but it’s probably smart to give customers the benefit of the doubt.

My wife’s an avid reader and subscribes to BookSwim which is like NetFlix for bookworms. She sent her books back a couple weeks ago and hadn’t received her next set of books so she sent a frustrated email to BookSwim and planned to cancel. She received this email back the same day:

Hi Kacy,

Gosh, it’s been a long time since those books were sent; it sounds as if the postal service had a fit of kleptomania. It’s certainly not normal at all! I’m very sorry you experienced this delay. I’ve marked these books as lost and we’ll send you a replacement package from your rental pool tomorrow morning. In the meantime, we’ll keep an eye out for the prodigal books.

The USPS guarantees us 4-14 days shipping time on all media mail, but in the future, if a shipment takes an inordinately long time, let us know right away so we can send you a replacement package - there’s no reason to keep you waiting while the postal service holds your books hostage.

By mid-May we’ll hopefully have return package tracking so these things don’t happen in the future.

I hope this has answered your question. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to e-mail back or call 877-BOOK-SWIM.

Thanks for your patience!
Chip

Chip’s email is a bit folksy, but it did the trick. There’s no way Kacy would cancel her subscription now.

My wife’s experience reminded me of something that happened at CrimeReports.com. We had recently launched and we were getting some good press. We ended up with a link from the front page of CNN.com and that generated a ton of traffic. Everything was going great until Google’s servers decided that our Google Maps use seemed extraordinary and they shut us down (even though we were a paying customer). Since CrimeReports.com is a Google Maps mashup, the site is pretty useless when you shut down the map. We were down for almost an hour, but we had a friendly message up explaining that we would return soon. Nevertheless, we received quite a few nasty emails in that hour, many of them with expletives telling us how much we sucked.

We made a point of responding to every email — even the emails that told us where to shove our site. We apologized for the inconvenience and asked them to return now that we had resolved our technical problems. I don’t know that we won a lot of customers back, but I do know we received at least one apology.

The moral of the story is this: Don’t forget that your customer service is more important than your corporate twitter account when it comes to defining your brand. The customer may not always be right, but you probably need them to be your customer.

Your First Customer

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to get your first customer. If you are in a startup and you don’t have a customer, this (hopefully) keeps you up at night. So I’ve been thinking about this and writing about it and Googling and I found this article at www.onstartups.com. Even if you aren’t in the software business, I think there are some really useful tips — you should read it.

I’m going to try to add a post every day this week about getting your first customer. I’m interested in hearing how you’ve done it (or if you haven’t done it, what your challenges are) so I can add to my list of suggestions.