Chief Customer Service Officer
- Posted July 13th, 2008
- Filed under: Customer Service, On-Boarding
For the past week I have been serving as BatchBlue’s CCSO (Chief Customer Service Officer). It is a rotating position here at BatchBlue – every person in the company wears this hat for 1 week every other month or so. The rest of the time I serve as the company’s President, but for this week the CS hat goes on top. And I must say, it is such a rewarding job.
Customer inquiries come into BatchBlue in a myriad of ways; the “support@” e-mail address, general e-mails from the website, forum posts, our toll-free phone number, blog comments (ours and others), tweets, On-Boarding requests (the BatchBlue version of new customer orientation), and our Get Satisfaction account. When we started the company, we always knew that customer service is the top priority. Much of the BatchBlue staff were professionally raised at the start-up Amazon.com whose customer service approach is legendary. In those early days of Amazon, all employees were required to start on the customer service front lines, as a quick-start way to get to know the product and company they were now serving. We’ve taken a similar approach here at BatchBlue and each spend time rocking the customer service cradle.
Happily, this rotation gave me a chance to correspond with some veteran BatchBook users. Folks were digging into the rule settings of their e-mail software to maximize messages sent using BatchBox e-mail forwarding, they were using the import wizard to build out their SuperTags fields and some even sent in suggestions for advanced integration. There were a few problems, but the tech team addressed them quickly and the conversations soon turned to some product feature brainstorming and “did you get a new iPhone, yet?” (which, by the way I haven’t – I am the only BlackBerry holdout in the company).
If you have a good product, a responsive team and smart customers, then spending a week answering their e-mails and calls is a fun exercise in product familiarization (I always learn something new about BatchBook when I look at it through someone else’s lens), market research (who better to help you decide on new features than the folks actively using it), and friend building (even with iPhone users). Customer service is the greatest privilege of this business owner. Can’t wait for my next turn.
