>>Is there a reason why they all seem to have the same blind spot?
I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc.
Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong.
The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it).
In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc.
It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is.
EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.
It's odd how few CEOs figure this out and bake it into the DNA of their company.
There is one notable exception, and they seem to be destroying their competition. Scaling doesn't appear to be a problem either. Amazon are doing pretty well. Bezos is known to indoctrinate his employees with a few strong principles, and customer obsession is #1.
Their straight-up customer support is outsourced, but works well enough from a scaling perspective. Given how large the company is, I also agree that they get an A- at worst.
But more importantly, their domination of logistics is a truly impressive feat. There is a constant flow of articles on HN, reddit, and everywhere else about how Amazon's prices are no longer the cheapest and how they are a monopoly and how you should shop around and JET.com and blah blah.
No one cares that it's not the cheapest. It's almost like people forgot that 10 years ago, buying things online and dealing with horrendous shipping was a nightmare, complete pain in the ass, and took forever. Amazon decided to grab USPS by the neck and make them work Sundays (how do you get a government institution to do that?!) and develop their own logistics network to deliver many items same-day, or even within an hour. It's truly an amazing feat that puts customers' minds at ease; there is no wonder why there is such loyalty to Amazon.
Solving that customer problem is like an act of God to the masses.
>>What did it take for you to get it to that point?
Honestly, I just refused to run customer service like Comcast. I didn't want to contribute to what I think is one of the worst trends in business today. I didn't really care if it was good for the business or not.
>>Was it mostly a training & process change or did you invest in technology to help?
I worked for a year or so in call centers and I've worked a lot of crappy retail jobs in my life, so that was its own form of training I found very useful.
As for technology, we use Help Scout, Google Voice, Acuity Scheduling, Stitch, and Agile CRM. I can't remember what we use for postage and printing labels... it's pretty decent though. Nothing that spectacular or groundbreaking. Our online shop is powered by WordPress and various plugins, which works pretty well and is funny to talk about here on Hacker News.
Our warehouse manager reconfigured all of our USPS packaging and saved us a lot of money using various different types of flat rate based on zip code, that was a big cost savings with no impact to delivery time. That probably took the longest; getting logistics software to work well with our inventory management system and printing labels/postage properly. We did it by hand on USPS.com for months and managed inventory in Excel. But like anything else, you do it that way as a startup until it's too painful then you figure out a solution.
I haven't figured this one out. I think they all buy into the myth that customer service doesn't scale / is a cost center / doesn't have ROI, etc.
Except in my business we don't do anything even close to a Postmates (where I agree, CS should be priority #1) but we ship items around the country and do like 60-80 orders per day, and we made the decision a few years ago to seriously care about email response time, always pick up the phone between certain hours, return voicemails, ship things within a discrete timeline, and more importantly, offer refunds and accept blame 99% of the time something goes wrong.
The goodwill we get and social media cred from the customer service is worth a lot (tough to measure), but we also can measure ROI on the emails we reply to and phone calls we take. We find that tons of people will email or call in with an irrelevant question that has nothing to do with buying something, we'll answer it well, and they are then very likely to buy something immediately after. Customers like to know a human is there for them! Our CS department nearly has positive ROI from measurable tasks, to say nothing of the untrackable rewards mentioned above (and the feeling that we aren't scumbags, which is really the main reason we decided to do it).
In an era where everyone runs customer service like Comcast, standing out can be worth a ton. We also ship product slightly worse than Amazon Prime, which is pretty damn good - in today's market everyone wants things as fast as Amazon and don't want to buy things from random websites, and I understand! So if we can come close to that shipping time (USPS Priority Mail flat rate boxes are 2 days to most major metropolitan areas - even from the coast like we are), then that picks up repeat business and people talking about how fast we ship on Twitter/Instagram/etc.
It just doesn't seem that difficult to get right. But maybe it is.
EDIT: Well, "difficult" is subjective. It took us over 12 months to get our CS pipeline working well. But that was more "hard" than "difficult" - it just required a lot of work to mold it into the shape we wanted. The overall design was pretty simple: Just take care of customers at any cost.