You’re thinking about customer service wrong.

You’re thinking about customer service wrong. 

Customer service is one of the least valued parts of direct-to-consumer businesses. It is commonly the first job that a founder “exports” to someone else, and it is generally the role that gets paid the least at an organization. In addition, it’s almost certainly the role that gets outsourced abroad first. Today, more and more brands are outsourcing their customer service to AI, in the hopes that even the offshore team can be downsized or eliminated. 

And I get why. It’s really hard and frustrating to answer tickets. First, they never end. Even if you get to Inbox 0 today, you’ll have 100 new tickets tomorrow. Second, it’s incredibly frustrating. Customers lie or blame you for their own mistakes consistently. I’ve seen everything from “You shipped this to my mother’s address - why did you ship it there and how did you get her address” to “my dog ate my deodorant - can I get a free bar”. I’ve even seen customers tamper with products in an effort to get a settlement. 

But customer service is one of the best ways to differentiate an eCommerce brand from the competition. We’ve all had terrible experiences dealing with customer service from American Airlines or Comcast or even Facebook. Do you know why they can offer terrible customer service? They are virtual monopolies. If you don’t get an answer from Comcast, are you really going to shut off your internet and cable? Are you not going to fly anymore? 

But entrepreneurs in the eCommerce space are almost always selling virtual commodities save for marketing, packaging, and design. Do I believe that if Native’s customer service was bad, people would switch to Schmidt’s or Dove or Secret? Absolutely I do. 

Stellar customer service requires several things: 

• Fast response times. I still remember 10 years ago when I got this email from Homejoy saying they’d get back to me in 5-7 days. It took longer than that. It wasn’t a shock to me when the company went under!

• Empowered Customer Service Agents. Virtually every ticket you receive will be an issue someone is having. Your agents have to be empowered to make the right call. Sometimes, that means issuing a refund or store credit. Sometimes, that means replacing a package. Sometimes, that means holding firm on a policy and not issuing a refund/credit. You must empower your agents to make the call. The decision of how you respond to a customer is made when you hire the CS agent. You have to hire someone with good judgment and then give them the room to exercise that judgment.  

• Human empathy. A human “we messed this up and will make it right” goes a long way in reducing frustration and anger at your brand. 

Stellar customer service does several things: 

• First, it shows your customers that you’re a small business staffed by human beings. Americans love supporting small businesses. Don’t believe me? Here is the post where Schdmit’s says they were acquired by Unilever. Check out the comments. There’s a reason you won’t find a post about Native + Procter & Gamble on Native’s Instagram feed. People root for the success of small businesses. They fondly remember how they were an early customer/supporter. No one roots for P&G or Unilever (except shareholders).  
  

• Second, it generates goodwill. It’s a lot harder to get mad at someone that is a human being and genuinely trying to help resolve a situation than it is a chatbot. If your package is lost, are you more likely to buy from a brand that immediately replaces it or a brand that requires a chatbot before you get to a CS agent that then replaces it? This goodwill can generate that high NPS score and word of mouth you’ve always wanted.
  

  At Native, we created a word cloud for words that people used in our reviews and looked at it against a word cloud people used in reviews for Old Spice and Secret. While their most frequent words centered around efficacy, ours centered around human emotions like love. Simply put, we got people excited about the category while other people just served a need. I can’t find the word cloud, but check out the reviews we had here. When we were selling our business, we showed this word cloud to potential buyers. 
  

• Third, stellar customer service tells you where the problems are in your business. I knew that Native’s original formula wasn’t great because I answered every ticket that came in, and most were about how our formula wasn’t very good. I knew we had an issue shipping into Australia because I could see the tickets piling up. I knew our 3PL wasn’t shipping packages on time, because I saw it in our CS inbox. 

Good customer service empowers you to generate goodwill and improve your business. Don’t outsource it to AI so fast. 

I did a retreat with the Customer Service Team at Native before I left and told this story: 

When the Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher in a hotel in Brighton in 1984, they failed. "We were very lucky," Thatcher would tell reporters, because the bomb detonated while she and her husband were in the hotel but they were able to escape unscathed. The IRA also issued a statement after the bomb detonated and news of Thatcher's survival made it to them: "Today, we were unlucky. But remember, we only have to be lucky once — you have to be lucky always." 

Customer service needs to be lucky always. Poor responses can cost you materially in that customers who might repeat won’t because of the experience they’ve had. Each slip up can cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. Who is more likely to make that slip up - the agent you hired, trained, and empowered, or the chatbot you purchased? 

A failure of your chatbot with one of your best customers may prevent that customer from returning and purchasing again, which is the lifeblood of ecommerce. See this interaction? The chatbot went from “anything at all” to “I can’t help” in 4 words. Are you ready to risk losing your whales to this type of interaction? 

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