a canadian startup

e-commerce phone calls

go to amazon.ca and try to find a phone number to call.

face it, they don’t want to talk to you.

when your e-commerce site becomes large, the ability to wipe out the cost of a large telephone customer-service office and staff is tempting, or seemingly unavoidable. especially when you’re amazon and your staff has no idea about the products you’re selling.

talking about this issue, another entrepreneur told me to drop the phone number from our site. he didn’t have an argument so much as a catchy phrase: “the best customer service is no customer service, right?”

wrong. i don’t buy it. when we launched our e-commerce store, we wanted to be different. we talked a lot about breaking down the barriers between the customer and the store, and making the experience of shopping with us feel more friendly. our phone number is in big numbers on the bottom of every page — we’re almost encouraging you to call.

is this a good idea?

i like it.

is it scalable?

to tell you the truth, i don’t know. it works for now.

the way we operate phones right now is that i have programmed every phone’s secondary line to ring when customers call. yep, including my phone. kiela, here, is in charge of customer-care but she has other jobs as well. (welcome to a startup).

so yeah if you call at the right time, you’ll hear me saying:

“canadahomehealth.com. ali speaking.”

a small subset of our customers, usually older customers, like to speak to us. here’s a conversation i had from a couple days ago:

me: canadahomehealth.com ali speaking.

customer: hi, i wanted to ask a question about product x. do i need a prescription?

me: we don’t sell things that need a prescription.

customer: oh. okay in that case i’d like two. can i purchase them over the phone.

me: well, um… yes. you can. but it is faster to do your order online.

customer: yeah, well i don’t want to fill out all the forms.

me: well i have to fill out the forms on your behalf. it is faster if you do it yourself online…. but i don’t mind taking your order over the phone.

usually, we’re actually much nicer about taking phone orders, but in this case, i was doing a test to see if i could convince him otherwise. it’s a little known fact that when customers order over the phone, we just fill in their order using the same front-end website–just as if they were doing it themselves. so it’s not any more secure (it’s less secure because you have to give a human your credit-card number). and it’s painfully slow. worst of all, there is a larger chance of error from me mishearing your postal code or something.

but here is how the conversation went from there:

customer: oh, okay. i understand. i’d still like to do my order over the phone.

this kind of conversation happened a lot when we first opened the site. i would try to convince customers that it was actually in their interest to do the order themselves online. (it really is!). but no matter what i say to these specific customers, in the end, i’d still end up taking their orders on the phone.

i don’t get it!

but we’re nice so we don’t mind :) call away.