One of the joys of starting your own business is when the orders start rolling in. The feeling of highs and lows as you start receiving orders is counterbalanced with the realization that you have customers who have expectations about your product and service. As Zappo’s proved, customer service isn’t rocket science, but it can provide an edge over your competition.
By the end of 2006, we had reached the point at cleverbridge of needing to hire people to answer phones and emails. Our order volume had gone from a trickle throughout the day to 100 emails a day and 30+ calls. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you are the founder and you have so many other things to attend to, being constantly interrupted throughout the day really takes a toll on your productivity.
So we decided to hire someone to answer phones and emails, but the question was “what do we really need? These were phone calls about customers having trouble placing credit card orders or needing a copy of their software license keys. These were emails about needing a refund for a $40 purchase or needing a copy of the receipt for expense purposes. This wasn’t a complex research question about purchasing a B2B product or help installing an operating system update. With this in mind, what was the profile of someone that was fairly tech savvy, wasn’t looking for full time work and would want to work in a 1 person office? Students!
I ended up placing job advertisements on both UIC and DePaul job boards because of our office locations and hired 3 students: one a junior political science major who spoke fluent Russian, one a freshman English major who spoke fluent Spanish and the third a freshman computer science major who spoke geek pretty well. Why did I hire these three and not the others? Since cleverbridge is an international e-commerce company, I suspected that their language and/or technical background would keep them interested in what was a fairly simple and repetitive job for at least a period of time.
On each of their first day’s at cleverbridge, I sat down with them for 2 hours and explained our system, went through actual customer emails so that they could connect the dots with the real world, then set them on their way to answering the rest of the emails. Answering phone calls was something for day 3 once they knew the subject matter well so that they would sound confident on the phone. Today, new customer service agents start at cleverbridge with 4 weeks of classroom education before ever even seeing their future desk. Our system and the questions submitted were a lot more straightforward back then!
I was hoping that they would be around for at least 6 months so that I didn’t need to retrain someone new. Little did I know that two of the three would still be with the company today, 7 years later, and both having been promoted within the organization as we grew. The third one joined the Navy in an intelligence program after being with the company for 2+ years so all three made it past my 6 month timeline.
Did I time the hirings right and choose the right people? In my case, I would say definitely so, but there’s no guarantee that this is the right model in other companies due to the training requirements for your customer service agents. If your product is really complex with lots of customization, it would be very difficult to start this way, but we have now scaled to 60 agents across 3 continents serving 8 different languages. There are creative solutions out there for most problems.
