New Customer Service Rankings No Surprise
BusinessWeek’s recent rankings of top customer service retailers don’t exactly come as a big surprise: Legendarily customer-centered retailer Nordstrom occupies the No. 4 spot and sports outfitter Cabela’s holds down No. 15. We blogged about this earlier:
When you have 315,000 SKUs in the DC, as Cabela’s does, you can’t hope to have all that in your stores, but you can hope to have a great relation with the vendors—if Cabela’s doesn’t have an item listed, they link to vendor home pages.
(“It’s Not Just About Price”—1/15/07)
The link between satisfied customers and profitability is clear. Trying to please the customer from the very beginning by doing a good job of merchandising—that’s just part of the customer service equation. Then comes taking care of customers once they walk in the door or type in the Web site URL. For instance, according to BusinessWeek, James W. Cabela, the company’s vice chairman, takes a literally hands-on approach by delivering customer comments that he’s read through every morning to the appropriate department. That’s attention to detail.
Another piece of the equation for providing really excellent customer service is keeping the entire company thinking about customers. For example, when employees participate in Cabela’s product loan program, they get to use the company’s products if they write a review afterward—a perk that puts employees in the role of customers.
The BusinessWeek article also points to using home-based call center agents as another trend that is helping top retailers like Cabela’s provide high-quality customer service. Home-based agents tend to be better educated, less costly, and have much lower turnover rates than employees of standard call centers (10%–30% for the former, vs. 60%–100% for the latter).