Providing Customer XTC (Redux)
- Posted May 11th, 2008
- Filed under: Customer Service, How We Do It
Providing good customer service is one of the founding principles of BatchBlue. We’re a small team, but our customer base is growing (a good thing!) As we add customers, we naturally get more questions from folks about their accounts and our product.
The way we’ve decided to handle customer service is to have a rotating weekly schedule. Each person in the company works in the email queue for a week at a time, essentially being on call 24/7 for the week they are on CS duty. Our official response rate is two business days, but if you write to support@batchblue.com at 5pm on a Friday or 6am on a Sunday, you’re just as likely to hear back within a couple of hours. Incoming customer email also gets copied to our all-staff email address, so everyone knows what type of questions are coming in or what issues are cropping up. Then, in our Monday staff meetings, we review any trends, resolve any quick fixes, and discuss and prioritize feature requests.
Most of us BatchBluers met about a decade ago while working at Amazon.com, where customer service was also hugely important. There we were empowered to do whatever it took to make the customer happy, from waiving shipping charges, to issuing gift certificates, to re-sending a lost item regardless of its price. It must have cost Amazon a lot of money in the early years to take all these “customer XTC”-inducing steps, but Jeff Bezos is a smart man and he knew what he was doing. I’ve been following Zappos with interest, as they seem to have the same relentless drive to build their business by making their customers happy.
A lot has changed in the world of customer service over the last ten years, primarily that there are many more channels by which to communicate with your customers. In addition to our email queue, support forums and blog, BatchBlue has a twitter account were we post product updates, links to our blog, little bits of company news etc. We’ve recently opened an account with Get Satisfaction, a cool new site that describes itself as “people-powered customer service”. It’s a nice-looking forum that lets customers post questions about a company or product, and other customers or people from the company itself can respond. I think, and many people agree (link is to Brian Solis, one of my favorite new media bloggers and an amazing photographer) that this is the future of customer service: pro-actively going where your customers are talking about you to really understand what their needs are and how you can help.
I’m grateful to be once again working at a company where customer service is such a priority, and that we have tools available to allow us to do the absolute best job we can. Our customers seem to be appreciating it too. Customer (and Small Business Super Hero!) Scott Blitstein recently wrote a very nice blog post about us, and we’re compiling a list of other customer quotes to add to our website. Nothing makes all the hard work worthwhile like hearing from customers that you’re getting it right.
hi, michelle! thanks for using get satisfaction.com. let me know if i can help you out with anything.