I haven’t written much about work. As many of you know, I’ve had a “real job” since November, working for Cycling Sports Group, or as I tell most people “Cannondale“. We’re a pretty large bicycle manufacturer, with four major brands (Cannondale, GT, Schwinn, Mongoose) as well as some other great companies.  We have a tiny, but great web development team of 2.5 people and we share space with the Web Marketing team.

Technologically speaking, we are in many ways an Enterprise company, but I’ll write more about that some other time.

This is really a rant about scalability and customer service.

I remember when Groupon first started taking off, I was doing work with a lot of independent retail stores, and some thought it was the best thing ever, some were skeptical.
My dislike of the company came from the fact that it couldn’t work.  While they got huge amounts of people to walk through the door, they were only customers at a specific (ridiculously discounted) price point, but would never be customers at regular prices. Groupon would eventually turn into restaurant.com, a great business, but not the next coming of Christ.

I feel the same way about customer service.  Even though he’s kind of a douchebag, Tim Ferriss laid out a great sustainable practice.

Keep the customer happy.  If it is a problem that takes less than $100 to fix, use your judgement and fix it yourself.

When I hear about stuff like the Morton’s Steakhouse customer service handjob to a kind of douche, or other suck ups to known high profile personalities, I think the way most readers do, “hey, that’s great, going out of your way to make one customer feel special”  It’s like hearing someone on your local news, or This American Life receive the spotlight, and think, hey, they are just like me.

But how can you make that scalable.  Clearly Morton’s isn’t going to do that for all customers,or even all big spenders.  But it can happen.  They’ve created the dream.  I just wonder if that raises the expectation to create a let-down when things are less than spectacular.  Or should the focus be on creating a reliable business and customer service practices.

Related posts:

1. Four Female Customer Service Reps at a Fax Repair Company

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