Angie Stocklin: Why companies must not overlook customer service

I was recently reminded how important customer service and simply caring about the customer is for any business. My husband and I had our first child in November, and as parents do, we’ve purchased a variety of technology solutions to aid us on this journey.

Recently, a piece of this technology that we used 5-6 times every day simply stopped working. I tried to call the brand’s customer service team, but they had turned off their phones. I had the same experience when I tried to reach them via chat and Facebook messenger. They even turned off all commenting on their social media profiles. The only solution was to send an email, and 48-hours later, I had yet to receive a response.

At this point, we dug deep enough to find a private Facebook group that helped us understand this was a widespread problem that other customers had reported to the company weeks beforehand. We also found the company had recently raised a $20 million Series B funding round. The biggest kicker came to my inbox in the form of a sitewide sale email—as I was still waiting on a reply from the customer service team.

As a customer watching this unfold, the actions of the company made me feel that it prioritized selling units and didn’t prioritize its current customers or making sure their technology worked properly. Was this a little unfair? Possibly. But without any type of transparency or communication from the company, customers are left to fill in the blanks on their own.

Why do so many companies overlook customer service? Traditionally, customer service has been viewed as a cost center instead of a revenue driver, and it’s hard for companies to allocate funds to activities that aren’t moving the needle. At One Click, we took a different approach to solving customer problems and making customers feel valued. We tracked how many customer calls we turned into orders and the percentage of overall revenue that was driven through our customer service team. We also knew that customers that had a problem successfully solved by our team were more likely to repurchase compared with customers who never voiced a concern. These metrics were directly related to our topline revenue growth and allowed everyone in the company to value customer service as more than a bottom-line hit.

We also knew that strong customer service helped us stand out and differentiate ourselves in a crowded market. If you’ve ever purchased a pair of reading glasses at Walgreens or Walmart, you know it’s hard to find an employee to help you find the right pair of readers. Having an accessible customer service team was an easy way for us to stand out against our larger, more entrenched competitors.

We were fanatical about measuring the experience our customers had with our service team and their happiness with our brand overall. We learned what was important to them and acted whenever possible.

For example, most of us dislike encountering a long interactive voice response system (you know, press 1 for this, etc.) to navigate before speaking to a human—and our customers were no different. So, we got rid of it. We simply answered the phone and attempted to always have enough people on staff to answer it in an average of 30 seconds or less.

Finally, and probably most importantly, taking care of the customer was simply part of our DNA. It was in our mission and was one of our core values. So it wasn’t something we took lightly.

We made a conscious decision along the way to trust the customer and empower our customer service team. If a customer called in with a pair of broken glasses, we empowered our teammate to simply replace them. No need to send them back first, talk to a manager or send us a photo. It was a better experience for the customer, less stress for the agent and even cost us less money in human resources to just replace the readers with a new pair right away. In fact, customer service agents were empowered to do whatever they needed to make the customer happy without getting permission from a leader.

When you have the right team in place and set proper expectations and goals, you can get out of the way and let them shine.

So how did the situation I started with work out? Twenty days after our unit stopped working, I finally received a replacement in the mail. Of course, we found an alternative solution quickly after our unit stopped working, and the company lost a former advocate for their product. This is a great reminder that every business, even a venture-backed technology company, is a customer service business. Setting your organization up with that priority from the start will benefit it immensely.•

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Stocklin is an angel investor and exited founder who currently teaches entrepreneurship at Purdue University.