Customer Love Rewards
Headsets.com is an incredibly interesting customer service-centric company (see my interview with CEO Mike Faith here). They do a lot of things that make them a very down to Earth, customer friendly organization: they have flexible return policies, great employees, a big selection, competitive pricing, etc. I have a huge amount of respect for the company. I was exploring their web site a few nights ago and came across this page: Customer Love Rewards at Headsets.
The concept is pretty simple and not totally original, but it works. The company has a points/reward systems for purchases. You get 10 points for every dollar you spent (a $100 headsets gets you 1000 points) and 10,000 points for your first order.
The idea is a nice one. It provides customers with a simple way to get rewarded for purchases. It’s a great customer loyalty program. Great customer service (Headsets.com calls it “customer love”) makes customers loyal anyway, but an actual customer loyalty program with some nice prizes never hurts.
Their program is nice because it’s incredibly straight forward. It isn’t loaded with legal terms and conditions and people are able to keep their points once they claim one prize. The prizes aren’t bad, either. If you spend $20,000 with Headsets.com (about 80 fairly high end headsets), you can get a nice Aeron Chair or a high end digital camera (might make a nice prize for a high performing customer service representative).
They also had some humor built into the program. If you spend $10 million with them (which I think is more than 10% of their annual sales), they will literally buy you a house. Who knows if any customer will actually get to that point (something they point out), but it’s amusing to see if anyone does.
I like how a straight forward company took a straight forward approach to something that is usually loaded with terms and conditions.
By the way, Customer Service is the New Marketing is on Monday, February 4. If you are interested in attending this great conference on customer service, it isn’t too late to register. Use the code SUBL and you’ll get 15% off the registration price.
Featured speakers at the event include Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos), Alex Frankel (Author of “Punching In”), Michael Murphy (Head of Customer Service at Virgin), and Robert Stephens (founder of the Geek Squad). There are also two panels (one on scaling customer service, another on community and customer service) and a lot of great lunchtime workshops (including one that I am running).