Service Untitled

The last few days has actually been fairly big for Service Untitled.

Mike Faith, the CEO of Headsets.com discovered Service Untitled the other day and I exchanged a few emails with him since his comment at Service Untitled. I spoke with him this afternoon. He is an interesting guy to talk to and I noticed a few things:

• First of all, he took the time to A) comment on Service Untitled, B) respond to my email, and C) talk to me. Very few companies will do any of those.
• He apologized profusely about not returning my call. I think he apologized about four times during the phone conversation and twice during the few emails we exchanged.It’s okay for you to not return a phone call occasionally, as long as it isn’t consistent and you can make sure any issues get resolved when the customer follows up.
• He uses Google News to monitor the web for updates on Headsets.com, which is how he discovered Service Untitled. Mike said that if a customer or an article is written, they either thank them (assuming the write up was a good one) or try and resolve issues (if there was a problem).This technique isn’t new or revolutionary, but it’s not done as often as you think it would. Guy Kawasaki actually wrote a post about this topic not too long ago.
• I mentioned I had bought a headset from Headsets.com and he was genuinely interested in my experience purchasing it and how it was working (never had a problem with it).
• He likes Service Untitled. This isn’t really related to his customer service expertise, but it may mean he has good taste, right? Regardless, it also shows that Mike understands Headsets.com has room to improve (as do all companies) and that a blog on customer service is worth reading.

I’ve talked before about how important it is for the management team to care about customer service and Mike and the rest of the Headsets.com management team is a quintessential example of that. I’ll be interviewing Mike sometime over the next few weeks. I’m pretty sure he’ll have some good insight and tips to share.

There are also two more interviews in the works over the next few weeks.

• A senior executive from HP about how the company is embracing customer service, trying to improve, and more.
• The executive at Rackspace who pioneered the company’s legendary “fanatical support” about how Rackspace has embraced customer service, what they are doing to improve, and how they do it.
• A senior executive from Automattic on many things related to customer service and blogging.

I’m still working on getting a few more interviews with executives from various companies, but we’ll see how that goes.

On a semi-related note, I’ve been noticing that companies that provide great customer service also have equally helpful media relations departments. It’s been accurate every time so far and is even relative (company 1 provides great customer service and has great media relations people, company 2 provides mediocre customer service and has mediocre media relations people). When I say a company has great or mediocre media relations people, I’m generally talking about the customer service they provide, how quickly they get back to people, etc. – not necessarily how good they are at their jobs (I am no where near qualified to tell).

I’m also sorry to report that the trackback system is broken again. I have no idea why, but it is and I will try to get it fixed as soon as possible.

Edit: Trackbacks should be fixed.