Web 2.0 is the Sizzle, but Customer Service is the Steak

Last week TechCrunch ran an excellent post about customer service by Andrew Scott. In it he discusses the generally dismal levels of customer service we’ve all unfortunately come to expect, and the fact that many Web 2.0 companies are no different from the rest of the pack.

It brought to mind the book Peak, which we’ve been reading as part of our book club. We first heard about the book at Tony Hsieh’s keynote at South by Southwest, in which he explained how exceptional customer service enables Zappos to sell a billion dollars worth of shoes every year.

We’ve always been very customer-centric at SurveyGizmo. Heck, as a bootstrapped company with no outside funding, we had to be because it’s been very clear from day one who really pays our bills. Practically every employee started out doing some degree of customer support, and we now have a program in place where we rotate all developers through customer service shifts once per month. In our hiring we look for people who are naturally tech savvy, friendly and helpful. (Check out the job application we have all potential employees fill out before we look at their resume.)

But it’s not as simple as that. We (and particularly co-founder Scott McDaniel) spend a lot of time in training, mentoring and motivating our support team. It’s not just knowing the software. It’s the little things like having a friendly tone of voice, being patient when a customer has trouble understanding a particular concept, and forthrightly acknowledging and fixing bugs when customers stumble across them. And we try to empower our support reps to, first and foremost, do the right thing. This shows up in the many testimonials we’ve received about our customer service.

We track our results via (what else?) an online customer service survey and particularly track whenever someone receives a WOW! (defined as five-star ratings across the board). We review the results frequently and reward WOW! recipients with prizes and accolades. The result of this intense focus on service is, as we hoped when we set up the program, a lot of WOWs, so much so that it’s become almost routine.

Sometimes, though, customers surprise us with their gratitude. Last week for example, we were pleasantly surprised when the postman brought us this:

It came from a customer who was especially appreciative of the help we’d given him on a very complex (200+ pages!) survey. We can’t wait to throw some of these babies on our grill.

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