Customer Service in the Digital Age

My wife's family owns an Ace Hardware.

Aside from permanently changing my weekend shopping habits, marrying my new sweetie caused me to pick up a few customer service imperatives along with a ton of new in-laws.

See, they don't have a fancy phone system with a big complicated phone tree. The phone rings, someone picks it up (usually one of my in-laws). When the store is closed, you get an answer machine - but that's the only time you'd ever hear the answer machine.

No pushing a number to talk to a department, no waiting on hold for the right person - every employee in the store knows everything about everything in the store, by necessity. This, by the way, has been true of all the Ace and all the Zappos employees I've spoken to, so it's not just this Ace or this company.

Welcome to Voice-Mail Hell

Contrast this to what happens when you call my cell phone - I almost never pick up. If I'm lucky enough to have space on my voicemail, you might get a call back within a month. The message warns you that my phone is a black hole of lost hopes and dreams, and that you should write me an email instead.

If you write me an email at 3 a.m., you may get a response within five minutes - depending on how much coffee I've had that day. You'll certainly get a response that same day, if not that same hour. I run a perpetual cycle of inbox zero - not because it's an obsessive habit or something, but because it's how I like to communicate, so I've made myself efficient at it.

Emails don't fester for weeks, originals unread and responses unwritten. Tweets go answered the same day. Facebook messages, too. But leave a voicemail? Yuck.

I once had someone email me a very detailed description of a project. I emailed them back, thanking them for their thoroughness and giving them a detailed estimate. They responded to my email and asked to speak on the phone, which - though grating - I was willing to do.

While on the phone, this person then seemed to read word-for-word their original email - the one I'd already responded to, the one they'd already seen me respond to - over the phone. I almost had an aneurism.

After politely declining to work on the project, I asked them why - when they'd seen me respond with questions already - they wanted to waste my time by repeating the email I'd already read? (Again, politely).

My Generation

"It's just how my generation does things," they said. And then I realized that - though most of us know how to write an email - it sure doesn't seem like an instantaneous form of communication sometimes, does it?

If the person on the other end isn't me - if they actually, you know, turn off their computers and go outside and those kinds of things - then what chance is there of getting an immediate response on your email? And is that even necessary? Probably not.

There was a great quote from someone - I think it was George Carlin being interviewed - who said, "We'd be at the dinner table when the phone would ring and my brother and I would jump up to go answer it. My father would tell us all to sit down. It was for our convenience - not for anyone else's."

Same problem - different medium. It comes down to externalities and costs. The cost to procure a line of communication is nearing zero (Google Voice, Skype, Gmail...).

The low-cost or free mediums, naturally, will be for my convenience and not yours. My email address and Google Voice numbers I use just to fill out forms where I do not want the company to contact me back. Others - the expensive ones - will be for your convenience and not mine.

My main Gmail - obviously, is for your convenience, because I have to spend time to clear it out and make sure that your emails are the ones that get through. But Google Voice, that's for my convenience - because it lets me screen your calls to figure out if you're going to waste my time before we talk.

Convenience for Whom?

So what makes for a good customer service experience at a business? It takes a business that isn't completely selfish - one that is willing to forgo some convenience for themselves, to take on a little cost. A phone system is expensive, sure - but it sure is convenient, too - if I can make you wander around a phone maze for an hour, wait on hold for another hour (with the same repetitive stock music, because we didn't want to pay for the licensing fees), and maybe if you hang up - that'll be really convenient for you, since you can pay fewer operators. It's expensive for your customer, too - who has to waste their lunch hour, another hour after that, their cell phone minutes.

What happens if you save the cost of the phone system and just answer the phone instead?

Seems to work for Ace. And Zappos. And any number of other small businesses near you.

Gotta go. Phone's ringing.

You can find more from Nick Armstrong on Twitter (https://Twitter.com/ImNickArmstrong) and at his personal website (https://www.IAmNickArmstrong.com).