Customer Service is the New Black

From an interview with Kayak.com’s co-founder, Paul English. He’s talking about having real people in your company answer real problems from customers. I think his philosophy is brilliant: If you put the complaints in the face of the people who can make the complaints go away, things get fixed quicker.

Customers are a big source of my e-mails. Anytime anyone contacts us with a question, whether it’s by e-mail or telephone, they get a personal reply. The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m smoking crack. They say, “Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?” If you make the engineers answer e-mails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they’ll actually stop what they’re doing and fix the code. Then we don’t have those questions anymore.

From Seth Godin to Gary Vaynerchuck to Paul English, it seems as though customer satisfaction is the new trend.

“Amen to that”, I say! What companies have treated you well recently? Not so well?