The reality is that this small subset of our customers is not at all indicative of the vast majority who shop with us and rarely contact us. Those are the customers that make our business successful. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to run the business that we run the way that we run it.

One of the ways that we try to say “Thank You” each January is to send all of our best customers from the previous year a $20 gift certificate along with an email thanking them for shopping with us. It’s just a simple way to let them know that we notice how much of their hard-earned money they’ve spent with us, and that we sincerely appreciate it.

Today I sent out this year’s emails. Here’s an example:

Why? Because while I was away Greg closed on a new house. Mike and I both told him that we’d cover as much of his work as we could for the rest of the month while he got settled and took care of the plethora of projects that any new home owner is faced with. Just as Greg has covered for us when we have traveled in the past. In my case, Greg covered as much as he could for me while I was in Virginia even though he was finalizing things with the house closing. He and Mike also covered for me during the hurricane disaster.

The most important function of our business (or any business for that matter) is ensuring that our customers have a great experience with us. Sure it would be nice to get some development work done or work on some marketing projects, but those pale in comparison to making sure that every order gets shipped out quickly and accurately, and that those customers who have questions about their order get taken care of quickly. Any time one of those areas weakens, we immediately shift our resources in that direction. Could Greg have answered all of the customer service questions? Probably. But it certainly would have been stressful for him, and the customers probably would have had to wait longer to have their inquiry resolved. It makes total sense for me to shift off of development and over to customer service. This just seems completely logical to us.

There’s a nice side benefit to this: I get to see the business from a completely different perspective. As an owner, that’s hugely valuable to me. In this case, I’m answering a lot of customer service questions as we’re in the process of hiring someone to do just that. Think that will help in the interviewing and training process?

I think this is somewhat to be expected of owners of a small business. The good owners at least anyway. It becomes more difficult when you expect this level of teamwork from your employees. Everything we do has a purpose, so the last thing I ever want to hear from an employee is “I’m not doing that because it’s not my job”. That’s the antithesis of teamwork. As I look around at the people I’ve worked with over the years, it seems like this is a personality trait you either have or don’t have. If someone is out for themselves without regard for their peers or the company’s customers, no amount of structure is going to help them become a good teammate.

However, I think a company can make it easier or more difficult for someone to be a team player. If someone’s raise is rigidly tied to specific projects getting done, it’s hard to fault them for doing anything other than those projects. If, as managers, you don’t do a good job of explaining “why” you need someone to shift gears and help somewhere else, it’s hard to expect someone to be enthusiastic about it. Conversely if you tell your employees that you value and reward teamwork from the beginning, and you fully explain how that teamwork helps everyone, then I think it falls back on the person’s personality.

We’re lucky right now. Our warehouse manager Charlie is absolutely great at doing what’s best for the team. I think it’s one of his very best traits. This has never even come close to being an issue for us. However, as we keep adding people to our team, it might be more tricky. Alongside a strong work ethic, it’s arguably the most important trait you want in an employee. Depending on how good we do at the interviewing process, we may or may not end up being good at detecting it. We will however quickly get rid of anyone who isn’t’ working for the good of the team. I’m a big believer in “hire slowly, fire fast”.

What is Text Expansion?

Text expansion is one of those things that’s somewhat difficult to explain, but once you see it or try it you instantly realize the value of it. Lifehacker did a great feature on text expansion last year. Here’s how they define it:

Text expansion utilities monitor your typing and trigger rules when you type a predefined phrase or key combination. When you type one of those pre-defined phrases, your text expansion utility removes your short version and replaces it with a longer phrase without requiring you to type the entire thing – saving you loads of keystrokes and time.

One of the things that I say over and over at the end of customer service emails is “Let me know if you have any other questions and I’ll be happy to help.” Now I haven’t actually written that phrase in years. What I type instead is “lmk+” and then {Tab} and text expansion takes care of the rest. I like using “+” followed by {Tab} at the end of my “trigger” to ensure that there’s absolutely no way that text expansion will be triggered by mistake.

Here’s a quick video I put together that shows just how fast I can respond to certain emails.

The beauty of text expansion is that I can piece together several different canned responses to create a unique email without ever actually typing anything more than a series of short triggers that I’ve memorized.

I also love text expansion because I only have to think about a reply once. I get a lot of technical questions from non-technical customers. These questions require that I create a thorough response that resolves the issue and is also simple to understand, which can take some time and effort to craft. Once I get the wording correct, I can just add it to my text expansion script and the next time it arises I won’t have to think through that “perfect wording” again.

Using AutoHotKey With Dropbox

When I first wrote about text expansion back in 2009, I was using a product called Texter. Texter was created by the Lifehacker team several years ago (the last update was in 2007). It sort of works in Windows 7, which was good enough for me until we went on this customer service initiative and we needed a way for everyone to have access to the same database of standard responses.

After doing a little research I learned that AutoHotKey was the gold standard. I was a bit intimidated because it isn’t really a piece of software in the typical sense, it just runs in the background and allows you to write Windows scripts that can do all sorts of things, text expansion being one of them. I shouldn’t have been intimidated though – it took me all of 15 minutes to download it, install it, and get my text expansion up and running exactly the way I had it on Texter. I wouldn’t even bother using Texter. AHK is far more flexible and really simple to use. Their documentation is thorough, yet easy to read even for a non-programmer.

During my research I read a comment on Lifehacker by someone who used Dropbox to sync their AHK scripts across their computers. That was what I was looking for to tie all of this together. I downloaded it and installed it myself, and the AHK script ran fine from the Dropbox folder. Then I set Greg up with AHK and our Dropbox account and we tried modifying the AHK file on one computer and it synced perfectly across our computers. If one person creates a new standard response it’s instantly available to everyone in our company!

We created a cheat-sheet on our wiki so that everyone would have a simple way to look up each trigger and it’s purpose, as opposed to having to open and navigate through the long AHK file.

Another great thing about AutoHotKey is that you can run as many scripts as you want. We have a shared script, but I also have a personal script for some of my own salutations or standard responses for things that the other guys won’t ever need (like when someone asks me to review a book on my blog they get hit with “bookreview+”).

It’s an Investment

Text expansion is amazing. After using it for a few years, I can’t imagine using a computer without it. It is however, an investment, and like any investment it takes a little time to truly pay off.

In the beginning, it’s quicker to just type a reply, hit send, and move on to the next email. It takes an additional minute or two to standardize the response, add it to AHK, test it, and add it to the wiki.

After you start getting used to it a bit, it becomes just about as fast as copying and pasting from a standard responses document. You still have to look up the trigger on the wiki or by opening the AHK file, which takes just as much time as copying and pasting does.

The real benefit comes once you’ve memorized all of your commonly used triggers. Then you can piece together emails rapidly like I did in the video. You don’t need to type any part of the actual reply, you don’t need to think about wording it, and you don’t need to leave your inbox. You just answer emails really fast. Even if you do need to customize part of the email, you can freely flow from normal typing to text expansion without even thinking about it.

—

That concludes my three-part series on Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow. While our system is far from perfect, it’s a massive improvement from what we were doing before. We’re all able to work faster and more efficiently now, and even more importantly we’re in a position where we feel confident about plugging a new employee into our system.

In my previous post, Creating a Better Customer Service Workflow: Part 1 – The Problem, I gave an overview of the issues we’ve begun to face as we’ve introduced multiple people into our customer service workflow.

As you can see from the graphic above, our solution was simply Gmail. Well, a pimped out version of Google Apps Gmail that takes advantages of all of the unique features that Gmail has to offer in a manner that actually turns it into a pretty awesome customer service system for a small team. This solution sort of came about by accident. Since we use Google Apps Gmail on a regular basis, we’re always discussing all of the new features. One day Mike suggested that the combination of those would make for a pretty good customer service system. After some discussion, we all agreed, and we decided to give it a try.

How It Works

I’ve never been a fan of Gmail’s conversation view. In my personal Gmail, and in my Google Apps Gmail, I turn it off. However, for customer service, having these threaded conversations is ideal. This is the number one feature that makes Gmail an appealing customer service platform. It looks very similar to a ticketing system on the back end without having all of the downsides of a ticketing system I mentioned in the previous post.

Under our Google Apps account, we created support emails for our major sites, so detailedimage.support, lockerpulse.support, and sportslizard.support. Since we recently upgraded to the premiere business version of Google Apps, each of these accounts costs $50/year. We then routed all of our customer service emails to these new customer service addresses.

Stepping back for a second, the main downside of a shared inbox is that it can get messy if everyone isn’t on the same page. We made three simple rules: 1) every support email must have a minimum of two labels, one for the type of inquiry and one for the team member who is assigned the email, 2) emails should stay in the inbox until they are answered and then archived, and 3) if you’re passing an email to another person you should label it with their name, move it to the inbox, and mark it as unread.

Gmail has two features that make this super easy – address aliases and filters. We use address aliases to “tag” incoming messages from our contact form. For example, if someone picks “website issues” from the dropdown, the email will be sent to detailedimage.support+technical. Used in conjunction with filters, this allows us to automatically label every single incoming message with the type of inquiry and the person that should answer it. For instance, that email would be labeled “Site Issues” and “Team/Adam” because I handle all of the website issues.

This is absolutely huge. If I log in and there are 10 messages, I don’t need to look at all 10, only the ones that are labeled with my name. Given that there’s not a ton of overlap in our areas of expertise (I won’t be answering detailing questions, just like Greg won’t be answering technical questions), it would be a huge waste of time for someone to have to do this manually.

The last critical piece of the puzzle is Gmail delegation. Gmail allows you to grant other people access to your account to answer email on your behalf (like, say, a secretary). We took each support email account and granted access to each individual’s Pure Adapt account, making it super simple to switch between inboxes (remember, one of our goals was to not add complexity to our routine, and logging in and out of several Gmail accounts all day long qualifies as that). I’m the only one who answers questions on all three sites, so here’s what delegation looks like for me:

When you send an email, it says that it’s from “Detailed Image Support (sent by [user])”, where [user] is the sender’s individual Pure Adapt email address. This lets us search by sender. For instance, if we want to get a quick look at all of the sent messages by a new customer service employee, to check for quality or quantity or response time, we can.

As an aside, because of this new system we have all stopped using the Thunderbird mail client and moved to using Gmail directly in the browser. It was a long time coming. Thunderbird served us well for years, long before we were on Google Apps, but the time had finally come to ditch it and move to the browser. Gmail is arguably a higher functioning email client than anything available on the desktop.

The Advantages

The primary advantages of using a system like this is that it solves all of the problems I mentioned last post. We can all see, search, and reply-to everyone else’s email. If someone goes on vacation, someone else can just step right in and pick up the slack. There’s never an issue of a customer contacting us twice in two different locations.

This also compliments with our internal “User History” system well. The system allows us to look up and modify everything someone has done on our site. We can search by all sorts of criteria, like name, email, user ID, order number, tracking number, etc. One of the bits of information that gets displayed is their inquires through our contact form, along with a corresponding request number, making it simple to then take that number and search it in Gmail to find the ensuing exchange. Down the road, I may integrate these two things further so that the entire conversation is available to view in their User History, but for now it seems to work really well. With a few clicks you can literally find out everything you need to know about a customer.

It also should be noted that the setup time for this was a huge advantage. Less than a day of time total on my end to configure everything, document it all, and then have a meeting to kick it all off. Compared with the setup time on a ticketing system, or the development time of a custom system, this was a breeze. Gmail is also a familiar interface for all of us, and it’s likely to be a familiar interface for our future employees, which will help cut down on the learning curve.

For what it’s worth, as we all move towards using mobile phones and tablets as complimentary email devices, Gmail is very well supported. Not something we really took into consideration, but it is nice to not have to worry about our ticketing system not having a mobile website/app for every platform out there. Gmail works well across the board. I know for me, it’s easy to switch back and forth between accounts on my Android phone.

The Limitations

Like with any system, there are some limitations. Here are the big ones to me:

• Lack of stats. Even though we can search by user, and in Gmail you can see all of your account activity, we don’t have access to the types of stats most ticketing systems do. It would be nice to break things down by user, like average response time, number of requests handled, and overall time spent answering questions per day/week/month.
• 10 person limit. You can delegate a Gmail inbox to up to 10 people. Not a big deal for us for a long time, but it’s a downside for sure when you talk about system scalability.
• Conversation grouping isn’t perfect. If the subjects match, Gmail tends to group it into a conversation, even if it’s from a different sender. This has forced us to take any generic subject line like “Detailed Image Tracking Information” and change it to “Detailed Image Tracking Information. Order #12345″ to avoid this. Kind of a pain, but not a huge deal.
• No labs support. Gmail labs features don’t work when you’re in a shared inbox, whether you configure them in your account or in the master account. There are a few labs features I’d like to use, but we can’t.

That’s basically it. All in all, a relatively simple solution to what was becoming a big problem for us. We’ve been using it for about a month now and it’s been a huge improvement.

In my next post I’m going to discuss how we use synchronized text expansion to speed up our response time.

We’ve recently overhauled our customer service workflow so that it’s simpler, more scalable, and more efficient. These changes apply to all of our sites that generate a lot of customer questions – Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and SportsLizard, but primarily you can assume that I’m talking about Detailed Image throughout, given it’s relative importance. This is the first of three posts. In part one, I’ll discuss the problem with the way we did things previously. In part two, I’ll go over our solution, and in part three I’ll outline one of the major changes that has drastically increased the speed at which we can answer any given email.

Life Is Simple When It’s Just One Single Person

When any small business is first getting off the ground, you usually just have one person answering customer service inquires. In most cases, this is how it should be: KISS. There’s no need for the added complexities that come with multiple people providing customer service.

Whether a customer emails you or submits an inquiry through a contact form, the workflow is pretty much the same: you get the email, you reply back, you and the customer continue to email back and forth until the issue is resolved, and then the conversation is forever archived in your email to be searched and referenced by you, the sole customer service agent. Everything is nice and simple, kind of like this:

With Two People, It Gets Complex

Unfortunately, as soon as you introduce a second person into the system, all hell breaks loose. Now, emails can go to either of you. You can each search your own emails, but you can’t see the other person’s. It looks a bit of like this:

This isn’t catastrophic – it’s how we operated for several years – but you run the risk of having several recurring issues. The largest deals with customers who contact both customer service people, either inadvertently (because they’re anxious and they want a reply) or intentionally (if they don’t like what one person says, they try another to see if they can get the answer they want). This can result in double work being done, confusion, and, if a customer happens to get a different response from each party, an inconsistent (and unfair) customer service experience. You also can run into issues when someone takes a day off. If they don’t check their email, important inquiries can go unread and unanswered in a timely manner.

Now, we combated this with some common sense. We’d forward customer service emails to someone else when people went away for any extended amount of time, and we’d do our best to chat with each other when we were unsure of a situation. This worked, mostly, for the better part of five years.

Eventually though, these problems became too big to overlook. We needed a way to avoid those mistakes. Everyone had to be able to see, search, and answer everyone else’s conversations without adding time or confusion to our already busy days. Preferably, this new system would save us all time.

We also needed a system that could be easily taught to an employee. This was really what pushed us to make the change now. We will be hiring soon, and one of this person’s big responsibilities will be to answer Detailed Image customer service. We need to be able to monitor what they’re doing, jump in at times, and not have to worry about fragmenting things further by creating another separate email account.

Ticketing System? Not For Us, At Least Right Now

Most companies choose to solve this problem by using a ticketing service or ticketing software. We’ve all experienced this many times as customers. You send an email or submit a question through a contact form, and then you get an email letting you know that a ticket has been created, either immediately or after someone manually creates it. Then you might get an email a little later saying “Your ticket has been assigned to Matt”. And then eventually you get a reply to your question. If you then want to reply, you either have to visit their website, create an account (sometimes), and reply in their ticketing system, or you have the choice to reply via email between those asterisks….you know, the ones that look like this:


******************************************************************************************
TO REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE PLEASE REPLY BETWEEN THESE LINES. EVERYTHING ELSE WILL BE CUT OFF
******************************************************************************************


At the end of it all, you get an automated email asking if it’s OK to close the ticket. Sometimes you then get another email asking you to rate the person who helped you.

Now, ticketing systems have some real advantages on the back end, but my partners and I don’t like this customer experience at all. I recently submitted questions to two different companies, both of which we are paying customers, both of which use Zendesk. Zendesk seems to be the new leader in this space, at least for web apps. In both cases, I had to sign up for a separate account to reply to the ticket. In one case, it took two days for the ticket to be created, and another two to get a response. In both cases, despite my questions eventually being answered, it felt like a very cold experience.

Contrast that with when you contact a company and you get a real email back. It feels much more personal, much more friendly. You can just click reply and say what you need to say. It doesn’t matter what email program you’re on, it doesn’t require you to reply in any way that’s different than any normal email, and you can attach anything you want and it will definitely get to us. In short, email is the simplest, quickest, and least stressful way for a customer to participate in a customer service exchange. At least that’s how my partners and I feel.

A ticketing system might eventually be in the cards for us. It might be unavoidable when we have 10 or 15 customer service reps. But what about when we have two or three or four? The more we thought about it, the more we were against a ticketing system right now. There had to be an intermediary step for us, one that preserved the advantages of email while still solving all of our problems. We contemplated building our own custom system, but the time and work involved seemed too complex. What to do?

In my next post, I’ll outline our solution. More to come…

The problem becomes how to go about talking to your users in the most authentic manner. I want to engage with users right when they visit our site for the first time, people who are power users, and everything in between. Early early on in the planning of LockerPulse, I stumbled upon the site EveryBlock and was enamored with a box that they have in their footer:

Maybe that would work. It’s so easy and so simple that it drastically increases the chances that you’ll type out some quick feedback compared to just having a “contact us” link that brings you to a bulky contact form.

When we built LockerPulse without a standard footer we had to get a little creative to keep that box accessible. You can get to it a bunch of different ways – by clicking the X in the upper-right of a story, from the “more” button in the lower-right, and by clicking various links we have scattered throughout the site that solicit feedback by saying stuff like “Are we missing a great news source? Let us know!”

I wasn’t sure if that would be enough. Now that we’ve had a nice spike in traffic and registrations courtesy of the Google Chrome team, I’m somewhat surprised to say that we’re getting far more people filling out that form than I would have expected, and that the quality of the feedback is much higher than I would have expected.

Every time I open my email I’m responding to multiple people’s feedback. I absolutely love it. I always try to start a conversation with them and ask them as many questions as I can think of. This feedback is priceless. Sometimes it’s not easy to hear, but it’s really really important that we hear it.

The one common theme that we’ve had throughout the life of the site has been people suggesting the features that are next on our list. Prior to having college sports, everyone wrote in asking for us to add their favorite college team. I always wrote back that it was coming soon, and then asked them if they had any great sites/blogs that they currently read for that team. You know what? A lot of people replied with really good sites, which saved a ton of time when we had to start researching 73 new teams.

Now that college sports is live, we’ve been getting suggestions for fantasy player tracking, following athletes on Twitter, and incorporating video highlights…every one of which is on the top of our list for features. Since it’s still so early, and since we only have limited data to work with, and since the potential scope of LP is so vast, we’re basically adding features in the order that we want them as users so it’s validating to hear our users suggesting the very same things.

And finally, maybe the best part of having a box like this is the satisfaction of reading positive comments from people who genuinely benefit from using LockerPulse. I got both of these yesterday:

I think it is the best it could be. I don’t see any way you can make it better.

I love this app, I’ve been looking for something like this, it’s everything I need in one!

All of this works without us losing money because we really have only two ways that you can get a discount:

• You buy a product is on sale for everyone. These can be seen on our sale page at any time, and include our daily and monthly specials.  These products are discounted using formulas that take into account our COGS so that we never lose money on a sale product.
• You use a coupon code, which involves infinite possible combinations of product discounts, free products, and shipping discounts.

There are a few other factors like gift certificates and account credit, but for the most part that’s it.

Given that we don’t ever lose money on a sale product, the key to our entire sales philosophy lies within our coupon code system.  We’re able to run an unlimited number of sales concurrently without fear of losing money because we only allow one coupon code per order.

Each code is designed to give one advantage without another. For instance, a free shipping code with a min spend of $50 might not give any other discount so we make full profit on every product in the order.  Or if we give a free $20 product away when you spend $70, we realize that you’ll be paying full price for shipping, full price for your other products, and that our cost on that $20 product is far less than $20.  For the weekly special. the formula is completely automated to do exactly what I just described.

With all of that said, no matter how often we mention “one coupon code per order”, we get countless comments/questions from people who are “unable to use a coupon code” and it turns out they are just trying to use two codes.

We originally did a poor job communicating this. Our initial plan was to just try stating it more clearly with our promotions.  We also added some text saying “Limit one per order” to the confirmation message that you see when you enter a code:

Unfortunately, neither of those really did anything.  It’s not that we necessarily blame people for trying – some places do allow multiple coupon codes – but we want to be as clear as possible up front, plus there’s also no point in us fielding questions about it.  We had to come up with a better way without over-complicating the checkout process or turning people off.

Last night we unveiled a new checkout system.  Most of the improvements were behind the scenes, but one thing that is new on the checkout page itself is what you see when you enter a coupon code:

You now have to click to change your coupon code. We hope that the simple act of having to read and click that link will reduce the questions.

Will that help? We think so, but only time will tell.  What I love about it is that it’s subtle and definitely doesn’t deter you from using a coupon code.  I often see articles about “the promo code problem“.  It’s not a problem for us. We want our customers using coupons and getting good deals, and maybe more importantly feeling like they got good deals. It’s part of our business model.  Go ahead and Google “Detailed Image Coupon Code”. You’ll see our coupon code page where we tell you how to get coupons, our Twitter and Facebook accounts where we give away exclusive coupons, forums where we post coupons, and a few coupon code sites where we’ve made sure we signed up and added coupon codes.

While no promotional strategy is without it’s faults, the way we’ve combined  sale products with coupon codes gives our customers the option to pick and chose the types of deals that they like best, be it free product or free shipping or just a flat discount on anything we sell.  We’ve come to learn that different consumers like different types of discounts, and that for the most part the different camps are pretty equally divided.  I think a lot of companies spend an awful lot of time and money quantifying whether free shipping is more popular than 15% off or a free gift.  From our data and our experience,  you’re better off finding a way to offer all of the above and letting the consumer decide which they value more.

Anyway, a DI customer had a technical issue that I hadn’t seen before. After a few emails back and forth I was able to identify the issue and fix something on our end to solve the problem. Then this morning I awoke to this in my inbox:

Guys like you is what America needs right about now..good,smart young and vibrant leadership that truly cares about customer service to the masses, specially us car nuts!

Makes it all worth it.

I’ve only been out to eat twice in the past two weeks, and this exact scenario has happened to me both times.  It’s frustrating to sit around waiting when you’re hungry, however it’s understandable when the place is super busy and you’re waiting because the waitress is overworked.  Just a quick “I’ll be right with you guys” is all I need to know that she’s got the situation under control.  This scenario is much worse because you seem invisible to them.  You won’t get helped unless you say something, which sucks.

I think this also has parallels to email support in the online world.  When you pay good money for a service or product and you have to contact the company you just want to know that there’s someone on the other end.  Myself in particular, I will only contact a company if I’ve done everything that I can to solve my problem.  When you then send an email and hear nothing back you begin to wonder.  A day or two goes by, and you start to think “did I send it to the right email address?”  or “is a response stuck in my SPAM filter?”  Of course, it never is.  And if your problem is important enough, you have to email again or call, and that’s just as annoying as having to flag down that waitress.

When you’re the business owner, there are a few simple things you can do to be sure that your customers never experience this.  First and foremost, send an auto-reply to anyone who submits a question through your contact form.  Assure them that you received their inquiry and that you’ll get back to them shortly.  Secondly, answer every question within a day max, most of the time sooner.  If you’re waiting on something for an answer, send an email stating that you don’t have an answer but you will in a day or two.  If there’s a question from a customer in my inbox, that immediately takes precedence over any other email or any other task.  Without customers the business wouldn’t run, so that new web feature I was working on wouldn’t be of much value.

This really isn’t that hard.  It doesn’t require that you sit in your inbox all day long or that you can’t get other work done.  Just that you respond in a timely manner just like you would want someone to respond to you.

Update: a few hours after writing this post I had to call our hosting company because they hadn’t done something simple that they said they’d do.  Turns out it got lost in the shuffle and wouldn’t have happened had I not called.  I understand everyone makes mistakes, but as a business you really have to do your best not to let your customers get forgotten about.

The answer is pretty simple: because in many instances there are trade-offs.  There’s always the initial time spent up front. But sometimes even with the automation you end up creating more work for yourself in maintenance. Or, even worse, you lessen your customer’s experience.

I have one really simple rule when trying to decide whether something gets automated or doesn’t.  If it saves us time, requires little to no maintenance, is scalable, doesn’t negatively impact the customer experience (in many cases, we’re trying to improve the customer experience), AND the end gain is worth the upfront time and resources to make the feature happen, then we do it.  Otherwise we don’t.

A good example of a successful automation is the failed checkouts on Detailed Image.  That’s a win for everyone across the board.  Since we implemented that, the number of failed checkouts has dropped to only a few per week, with almost no multiple failures from the same user.  Previously customers would fail over and over and over again because they didn’t know what was happening.  We gave the customer the information needed to solve their own problem, and they have 100% of the time.  I used to answer emails from customers regularly, but since then I haven’t received one.  And they’re less frustrated because they can solve their own problem immediately instead of awaiting an email from us.  Win/win.

On the other side of the page, we haven’t fully automated our inventory system, specifically ordering from vendors and managing “out of stock” items.  The comments on that post were fantastic.  Probably better than the post itself.  A lot of people posed questions about why we couldn’t go any further.  I did my best to explain our situation and why a fully automated system could potentially cause more headaches for both us and our customers, in addition to the upfront time to create, test, and deploy the features.

A more extreme idea would be to try to automate customer service.  The customer emails us, we scan our large database of replies, and automatically email them back our closest match.  Sounds crazy, but it’s possible.  Most companies that do this do a hybrid version where they send back suggestions automatically but still have a real person follow up.  We might do that at some point. However, that would require a lot of upfront time/money/work, and it would probably piss people off.  One of our best competitive advantages is that we reply to our emails with real replies from real people, and we do it relatively quickly.  Instead of fighting everything with automation, the best long term business solution to handling our ever-increasing volume of customer service emails might simply be to just hire a customer service rep.  All of the programming in the world can’t create the quality answers that a good employee can.

With every single business problem we always go through this same iterative thought process.  It makes for interesting conversation because we can attempt to automate just about anything.  Just because you can do something though, doesn’t mean you should.  Or, as Kumar said, “just cause you’re hung like a moose doesn’t mean you gotta do porn!”