a canadian startup

What do you Need to Build Phenomenal Customer Service

If you’ve read this blog, you know that Well.ca is addicted to offering phenomenal customer service

As we train Jenessa, the newest addition to our gaggle of friendly people with phones on their desks, we’re thinking about how to “build” friendliness. How do you teach new people to be the kind of phone operators that make angry customers melt into happy ones, and happy ones melt into gushing ones?

Check out this message we received on LiveChat today:

We want to build the kind of service that elicits that kind of feedback every day.

How?

It starts with offering a great service. Make the value to the customer so great, that they have trouble believing that it’s true. Build your service and design the presentation in a way that makes people smile.

Then hire the nicest people. They’re easy to recognize: they smile too much, like to bake things for people for no reason, and give an inappropriate number of hugs or high-fives.

Then surround them with other friendly people in a friendly environment. All the meanness they’ve built up over the years will disappear when they’re surrounded by warm, funny people with candies on their desks.

Then be goofy. Make sure there is a Wii in the office, all your phones have googly-eyes on the handsets, and someone sends out weird YouTube links about cats doing cute/funny things.

Remove barriers to kindness. Don’t time calls, give flexibility in how to resolve issues. Train people to never lie, recommend competitors if there’s a better option, and say “that’s terrible and our fault” when things are terrible and your fault.

And lastly, do unexpected acts of kindness. Here, we’ll send surprise chocolates to some of our nice customers, or toys to their kids. We write hand-written “thank you” notes to every single person that orders from us. Do you have other good ideas of special little things we could do?

Last advice: when great customer experience stories happen, let the person on your team that made it happen know and own the story. Have them announce it to the rest of the team. Everyone here at Well.ca is waiting to be responsible for making the next person’s day.

Here are the three training documents we send to all new people in our customer service department:

• Joel on Software’s article on customer service
• Guy Kawasaki’s article on great customer service
• And my article (self-promotion alert) on owning the problem.