Customer service gets serious in 2008

I attended the Customer Service is the new Marketing Summit in San Francisco this week (VentureBeat was a sponsor), and I was surprised by the richness of discussion.

Every company and product is different, and some are going to need different levels of customer services than others. A mobile phone carrier doesn’t have to respond to your needs, because they’ve got you by the cajones; its tough to jump to a competitor, and there’s not that many competitors to jump to (although even here, Sprint offered such bad service, it essentially “fired its customers,” including me).

Then there’s the example I gave recently of Tony Hsieh, the San Francisco entrepreneur who started online shoe company Zappos. Operating in a highly competitive environment, Zappos excels by offering superior customer service. Some 75 percent of purchases come from returning customers, and repeat customers order more than 2.5 times every 12 months. Repeat customers also have higher average order sizes. Tony told me he’s aiming to break $1 billion in sales this year, from nothing in 1999. That’s amazing. Tony stressed the need to invest in your company’s culture.

Some of the main threads of the Summit were that the Internet can make the conversation with your customers much easier, that you can invite customers in to help you, and that you as the company should engage in the conversation with customers even if you’re not in control of where it takes place.

Christine Herron, who is consulting for Satisfaction, the company that hosted the conference, has done a good job of writing up the conference themes and sessions here:

1. Company-customer pact
2. Leading brands
3. Zappos
4. Geek Squad
5. Google-Flickr
6. Virgin
7. Alex Frankel undercover
8. Top 5 tips

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