Service Untitled

I met John Falcone, who is the President and CEO of Sennheiser Electronic Corporation, a month or two ago while I was in San Francisco (thanks to Mike Faith for introducing us!) and after a quick email exchange, John was nice enough to agree to an interview.

In case you aren’t aware, Sennheiser is a major manufacturer of microphones, headphones, and wireless transmission systems. I know about the company because they make my favorite pair of headphones. A bit of background: The company was founded in 1945 in Wedemark, Germany and is still family-owned and the part that John runs is a wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary based in Old Lyme, CT that focuses on sales and marketing of Sennheiser products in the United States.

Here’s the interview with John. The style was a bit different than the traditional Q&A style I normally use, so please let me know if you like it or not in the comments.

Our founder, Prof. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser, just passed away at age 98 and left a legacy that defines how and why we do things the way we do. His biography is fascinating and gives great insight as to our history and the man who made it all happen.

Before I came to Sennheiser, I was working for Philips in the consumer electronics market. A recruiter contacted me and asked if I was interested in coming to work at Sennheiser. I wasn’t really interested until I had a meeting with Prof. Dr. Joerg Sennheiser, Prof. Dr. Fritz Sennheiser’s son. That meeting made me anxious to join his team, and to become part of a family owned company.

We are a family owned company, and our mission of manufacturing high-quality audio solutions is as strong as it was 65 years ago. The Sennheiser family is committed to staying true to this mission over the years to come. The third generation has just stepped into management roles and will carry this mission into the future. While we are global corporation today, the family spirit and quality values of the brand Sennheiser can be felt all around the world.

Music plays a large role at Sennheiser. Due to our strong involvement in pro audio and the music industry, it’s natural that many employees are also very talented musicians or music aficionados – thus many Sennheiser internal conferences often end with sizable jam sessions after the official part is done. So when our employees talk to our end users- who are often musicians themselves – it soon becomes an authentic peer-to-peer discussion.

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This is my second year participating in the Age of Conversation project/book. Here’s how the website describes the project:

With over 300 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators contributing chapters, this collaborative work investigates the roles that community, conversation, experimentation, engagement, and collaboration play in shaping the 21st century’s economy of ideas. As businesses, public and private organizations, and individuals realize that there’s much more to social media and its impacts than first meets the eye, Age of Conversation III shows which platforms, tools, and approaches truly work.

The result is a cool book with a lot of different opinions and ideas from the great people listed below. What’s also nice is that all profits from the sale of the book are donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Check out the website to learn more and to order a copy.

Age of Conversation Authors:

When I was in New York last week, I visited the famous B&H Photo Video electronics store on Manhattan’s West Side. This very successful store’s unique business practices and philosophies have been written about in countless books and magazines over the years and from visiting the store or dealing with them over the phone or online, you can tell why. I pulled up the company’s philosophy on their website and found that it focuses on these five things:

- Our Easy Access Displays
- Our Educated Staff
- Our Partnership with Manufacturers
- Our Cutting Edge Inventory Tracking
- Our Liberal Return Policy

Needless to say, these things are very different than what you see or hear about from a typical electronics store. And what’s more interesting is that when you visit the store or buy something from the company’s store or website, many of these things are apparent. For example:

• Easy access displays. You can try out almost everything on the floor at B&H. Instead of just looking at the boxes of headphones or of portable hard drives, you can put the headphones on and see how big the portable hard drives are. I didn’t notice much that was just kept in boxes or otherwise inaccessible to customers.
• Our educated staff. I didn’t ask anyone there any questions, but there is no shortage of stories about extremely knowledgeable B&H employees. A friend of mine (who is from NY) went with me to the store and also spoke about how knowledgeable the employees are. What was also nice was the large number of staff members available at any given time. They were all over the store and there were also well placed information booths where customers could ask questions.
• Partnership with manufacturers. B&H says it uses this advantage to let manufacturers show their “newest and hottest products to customers and staff.” Doing this helps to ensure that staff members are knowledgeable about what products are available and how they can help customers. The store also hosts meetings in its conference center to encourage people interested in particular topics surrounding photography and video recording to come to their store and share what they know with others.
• Inventory tracking. A system that makes special orders simple is a system that helps promote customer service. Beyond that, B&H has an elaborate and extremely unique system of conveyor belts and similar devices that move products around the store and to a pick up area. This helps cut down on shoplifting and employee theft and thus, helps keep prices low.
• Liberal return policy. B&H isn’t the only retail store that has a very liberal return policy (see this post on Nordstrom). A liberal return policy represents a desire to keep customers loyal to the company in the long run instead of just making money off of them in the short run. It’s easy enough to not accept returns and keep the money from that particular sale, but it won’t do anything to win customer loyalty. B&H places a premium on customer loyalty, which is why they have a liberal return policy.

B&H is definitely worth checking out if you’re in New York and/or if you’re in the market for any sort of electronics gear. They’re a great example of a company that puts customers first and believes in being honest and straightforward with its customers.

If you’re interested in reading more about this company’s interesting business practices (including shutting down orders on their website on Fridays and Saturdays), check out this great article in Inc. Magazine by Joel Spolsky. It’s worth a read.

Photo credit of the B&H checkout process goes to me (I took the photo when I visited).

This year is my second year (see this post about my first year judging) judging The Fanati Award, an award that Rackspace Hosting gives out to recognize their customers who value customer service as much as Rackspace does. Like last year, I want to do a brief writeup on the companies and the process.

Instead of written applications, this year’s submissions came in as short videos. Videos let you see (literally and figuratively) what companies do and how they work. They’re also interesting because they are more reflective of the type of culture the company has. Everyone fills out an application in pretty much the same way, but the type of videos that I saw varied greatly. Some were more “traditional” and featured people talking about customer service while some of the others were more upbeat and engaging.

The winner this year was a company called Pet Relocation. The company is interesting and a great candidate for an award like this because part of what they do on a daily basis is dealing with out of the ordinary situations that require going above and beyond to complete the service (moving a pet safely from point A to point B). Their slogan is “Any Pet, Anywhere, Any Time,” which implies that they are a company that wants to go above and beyond for its customers. From reading about the company, it’s easy to tell that they have a strong commitment to their customers and to providing the highest quality service.

Like most companies that excel at customer service, Pet Relocation knows what it has to do in order to impress its customers. Personalized service provided by people who are empowered to go above and beyond (and a strong desire to provide that type of service) is what has led to Pet Relocation’s success. Congratulations to them on winning The Fanati this year and thanks again to Rackspace for giving me the opportunity to judge the contest again.

You can see Pet Relocation’s video, and more information about the 2010 Fanati Award here.

I love Google. I use it as my search engine of choice and for my email, calendar, feed reader, and a variety of other things. I don’t talk about Google much on Service Untitled because one thing Google is not known for is its customer service. With the recent release of the Nexus One, this issue was brought to the forefront.

The background of the issue is straightforward: Google launched a major product that usually comes with an expectation of easily accessible phone support without phone support. Traditionally, Google has relied on self-service options like community forums, knowledge bases, and occasional support via email. For users of the Nexus One, that wasn’t enough. The result was a busy support forum at Google and a lot of confused and annoyed customers.

The phone manufacturer/carrier support model is a lot like the software/OEM manufacturer support model. Traditionally, carriers provide the support for the phones they provide in much the same way that PC manufacturers such as HP and Dell provide support for Windows. Apple changed this model quite a bit when they started supporting the iPhone directly, but most phone/carrier relationships are still like this (for example, I call Verizon, not Research in Motion, to get support for my BlackBerry). Because Google was selling the phones directly, the relationship changed and people started to expect their service from Google.

Luckily, Google caught onto this pretty quickly and announced today that they were launching a phone support line that would be open from 4 AM to 7 PM PT. Like with other phone manufacturers and other phone companies, people will be able to call and talk to a human.

There are some good lessons to consider as a result of this story:

• Consider expectations. I wrote about some reasons to provide phone support a while back and one of the reasons I mentioned is if your business model and industry call for it. In the mobile phone business, phone support is expected.
• Get it up fast. Google was good at getting its phone support up and running quickly. Even though a month doesn’t seem that fast by Internet time, it is a short turnaround time for setting up what will likely be a busy call center at a company that doesn’t really run call centers.
• Be prepared to break from your traditional culture. Google is not a customer service company. I don’t think anyone at the company would make that claim. Google did, however, break from that traditional culture in order to remain competitive and ensure customer satisfaction.

Think about this story and these lessons before you launch your next product. Doing so might save you some negative (or at the very least, critical) press in the future.

When I started Service Untitled back in April 2006, I was the only writer. I’d have occasional guest writers contribute to the blog, but for the most part, Service Untitled was me and me only. Nearly four years later (!), I’m happy to formally announce and introduce Service Untitled’s team of regular writers. The writers page features a listing of the regular contributors to Service Untitled, along with the photos and biographies of the people who bring you customer service advice and insight five days a week.

These people have been writing for Service Untitled for some time, but before today, there was not much information available about who they are or what they specialize in. The writers section is designed to provide that information. The writers section is released along with an entirely re-written and re-designed about section and revised contact and consulting pages.

In the new about section, you’ll also notice a new Service Untitled logo as well. This will be implemented into the main site’s design in the near future, but in the mean time, I want to show it off on the about page. A big thank you is owed to Bruce and his team at Logo Design Consultant for their hard work (and great customer service) in getting the logo designed.

About a week ago, I received a letter from Delta Air Lines with some surprising news. Because a flight I took on December 14 was delayed close to five hours due to weather issues at the airport, the airline was giving me a fairly large amount of SkyMiles as a way to apologize. The letter, which was signed by the company’s General Manager of Customer Care, said the gift was a way for Delta to “demonstrate its committment to service excellence and as a gesture of apology for its service failure.”

Needless to say, I was impressed with Delta’s proactive approach. The letter, which arrived less than two weeks after my flight, came without any prompting from me. I didn’t complain to Delta in any way about my delays – no letter, no blog post, not even a phone complaint. They just noticed that my flight was delayed significantly and decided to act on it. Despite having experienced some pretty horrific airline delays in the past, I have never received any sort of proactive apology from an airline, so this was especially interesting to me.

The letter was well written and apologized profusely for an issue that was not Delta’s fault without providing any excuses. The company thanked me for my business and told me how I could check my SkyMiles balance to ensure the credit was added and what I could use the miles for.

When a business goes out of its way to provide proactive credits or some other form of compensation for an outage, failure, delay, etc., customers usually appreciate this gesture. Given the fact that only a small percentage of customers actually complain about something that annoys them, acting proactively can go a long way towards earning a lot of loyalty from customers who might be upset and just not saying anything. Giving something equivalent to frequent flier miles doesn’t really cost anything and encourages customers to continue using your company in the future, so it’s a win-win.

To provide some context, I fly Delta regularly, but not enough where I have frequent flier status at this time. In other words, I’m not an especially important customer to them from a financial standpoint.

On Monday, I spoke to Toby Richards, who is the the general manager of Community Support Services for Microsoft. Toby’s background is in marketing and customer satisfaction and he now works with community and online support at Microsoft.

Toby explained to me that community has played a significant role in Microsoft’s long-term success. It is obviously in Microsoft’s best interest for other customers to get productive use out of their investments and having communities of engaged customers helps enable this. His team is made up of about 100 people in 21 countries working on community and online support. His team also directs another 200 or so people around the world who provide actual support in the community. It’s also worth noting that Microsoft has a huge number of people working on some type of community efforts,

Toby and I primarily discussed two aspects of the company’s community and online support efforts.

MVP Program:
The Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Program has been around for about 18 years and according to Toby, is “one of the most recognized tech community influencer programs.” The program’s goal is to thank and recognize influential community leaders for their contributions to the community (which can include frequent posting in news groups and forums, writing a widely read blog, authoring a book, etc.) and then form a community around these people. MVPs are recognized for a specific competency (e. g. Windows). Beyond the recognition, MVPs get a variety of benefits and access to Microsoft’s product and engineering teams. For example, at an MVP gathering in China last month, there were 25 product teams present and the teams talked with MVPs. With the growing popularity of social media, the MVP program has approximately doubled in size over the past five years.

Microsoft Answers:
Microsoft Answers is a support community in which people can ask questions and get answers from their peers. Microsoft’s community support forums are visited by 12 million people unique users each month, so as you can imagine, there is a large number of people asking questions and also providing answers. The forums are in 10 different languages and the company is expecting a big surge in traffic after the release of the new version of Microsoft Office in a couple of months.

When a user gets an answer that he or she is happy with, they click a button indicating a certain post helped them resolve their issue (about 50% of users will actually say their question was answered) and that post is then displayed more prominently. What’s interesting is that answers are viewed over 1,000 times on average, indicating that a much larger group of people than the original question asker get some sort of benefit from the community responding. If necessary, Microsoft employees also participate in the conversation and if applicable, forward feedback, issues, etc. to product teams.

Some other interesting takeaways:

• Each year, Microsoft hosts a conference for its MVPs in Redmond (where Microsoft is based). Over the course of 2 days, the company conducts 500 product feedback sessions with MVPs. The company covers hotel, food, etc. for the MVPs, but they are responsible for covering their own travel. An average of about 1,300 MVPs come from around the world. The event includes keynotes from Microsoft executives as well, including an introductory keynote from Rich Kaplan, who is Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Customer and Partner Advocacy. During his keynote, Rich goes over specific suggestions that came from specific MVPs and talks about how those suggestions influenced Microsoft products.
• Toby said that MVPs have told him that they feel that Microsoft has gotten more transparent and responsive to feedback over the years and through programs like the MVP program. An MVP saying they feel their own program helps is obviously a bit biased, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. If you have interacted with Microsoft, what are your thoughts on how they have been handling things over the past five years or so?
• Microsoft now has a support presence on Twitter at http://twitter.com/microsofthelps.
• HP and Dell both have communities similar to Microsoft Answers, but the companies work together. Toby told me that philosophically, Microsoft’s main concern is that users are getting answers. Microsoft works with HP, Dell, and other top OEMs and provides them with information on the top issues they encounter, so the information can be incorporated into the companies’ forums and support systems. Microsoft also provides the companies with escalation support if they need it as well.
• As expected, the communities are tuned to technical audiences because technical audiences have been engaged with communities and community support much longer than other audiences have. There is a very strong IT professional and developer presence. However, the consumer side is growing dramatically.
• Resource wise, Microsoft has been investing heavily in community support and is continuing to do so.

Over the coming weeks, I will likely be talking to another person or two involved with support at Microsoft. If there are any particular areas of Microsoft’s support that you’re interested in, leave a comment.