HOW TO SYSTEMIZE YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE

One year ago we decided to travel to the next stage of our business, land on this new island and conquer it. After reading "Traction", and spending three months implementing the first stages of it we moved forward. We went from 12 staff, to 30 staff in a few months, to 60 staff as of today (12/1/13).

At that time, (1/1/13) it was taking us 7 months to launch a client (industry standard is 12 months for a complex project). We told our new crew of 30 staff to watch us burn the ships that got us to this island. We told them that either you will launch these clients in 7 days, or we will shut down all the departments and rethink our business model. We burned the ships we traveled on, and we told them that if we do not launch our clients in 7 days, we will not sustain ourselves as a company and the same way we hired everyone, we will essentially fire everyone. We made it clear that we will make it happen or die trying.

The reason why we burned the ships were because we launched our new marketing campaign, and we started to get a hyper growth of sign ups. We started offering a complete end to end solution for setting up new clients, and we had to deliver on the promise we would give them.

To make a long story short, after 85 systems (processes), 6 months of enhancing our support desk software in Shopping Cart Elite, building Easy Data Feed to do data migration, we finally achieved a clear path to our goal. I have no idea how we did it, but we did it. We are still refining our strategies, but we lowered a 7 month launch period to 30 days. We are on schedule to start launching the stores in 7 days, and our final goal would be to launch stores in 24 hours after sign up. We made something that was impossible, possible.

In this post I want to share some of the systems and resources that allowed us to make it happen:

Definition of a System - Save Yourself Stress Time Energy and Money. If you would like access to any of the systems below, you will have to become a Shopping Cart Elite client and request it from your account manager via Skype.

a) Ownership and Accountability System - Imagine you come into a McDonalds fast food store, and you decide to place an order. You walk up to a cashier named Sara, and you tell her, can I have the #1 meal on the menu, but instead of the regular burger I would like a 16oz sirloin steak burger, medium well.

Sara being fairly new on the job didnt want to disappoint her manager because she was told that she must make every customer happy. So she went ahead and placed the custom order.

The order arrived to Mark in the kitchen who was confused about why he even got this custom order, but he was super busy, so he just let it slide. Marked looked in the fridge, and there was no sirloin steak, so he decided to send John to the supermarket to get some. John had no idea what a steak looks like, he never shopped at the supermarket by himself before, but he didnt want to upset Mark, so he just went with it. When John got to the supermarket he had no idea what kind of steak to get, so he ended up getting chicken liver instead because he didnt know any better.

When John returned to the store, he realized that the customer has been waiting 30 minutes, and Mark was on a break so he couldnt start cooking this steak for the customer. John decided he will just try and cook this chicken liver himself. He followed the same system to cook the chicken as he cooks the burgers, after 3 minutes he decided that it was probably done, and he delivered it to the front register. Little did he know that not only was it chicken, not beef steak, but it was bloody rare.

When the order arrived to Sara, she was extremely happy that she can now deliver it to the customer, she handed the tray to the customer and watched him sit at the table to take the first bite. I probably dont have to tell you what happened with the client after the first bite, I will let your imagination envision it.

Soon the manager of the store had to get involved to resolve the whole situation and he had to spend one hour figuring out what happened, who was responsible and make the client happy. It was a complete waste of time for everyone, and the business lost money because of it.

Now imagine if every client who walked into McDonalds requested some kind of a custom order, and someone like Sara would just keep accepting them.

This would become the core problem of the business, and the Ripple Effect will eventually bankrupt this business.

The example above happens daily in every startup. The owners just let each one of these issues slide instead of systemizing their business.

We had this problem when customer would ask us to build them a $40,000 website while they were paying a few thousand dollars for it. Customer would expect us to do marketing, SEO, content and data for them. The sales, customer service, and tech departments didnt know the scope of the requests, they would just accept them all and soon we had our own little Sara/McDonalds scenario.

Weve built systems that helped us eliminate this core problem:

a) Serving Menu - What is allowed to be served to the customer, what is not allowed, and what needs to go through approval of higher management before you accept the job.

b) Ownership - Who will own the project, so for example if Sara took the order she cant just pass it along and forget about it. If she takes a custom order she will own it.

c) Accountability - Who will be accountable for the work to be done, so if Sara needs Mark and John involved, she will make sure to meet with them and confirm they can complete all the tasks. Once the serving on the menu is approved, an owner exists, and accountable parties assigned, then you can decide on the deadline date.

b) Deadline System - When you dont have a deadline, you dont have accountability. You will procrastinate until you drop, you will take your sweet time, you will not think outside of the box to get the job done in time, and you will fail.

On top of that if you hire overseas staff and you do not have a deadline system to follow, you can expect to experience the biggest frustration of your life.

The deadline system we created showed the exact steps to follow in order to have a 100% delivery on the deadline. It also had pre-cautions that by not following this system your chances of missing the deadline increases greatly, therefore you are likely to miss the deadline if you dont follow the system, and there is no excuses for it so you will be fired.

The deadline system was our first process that we created, and it certainly put everyone in their place to be accountable to deliver their jobs. When they couldnt deliver the job, we would then all meet and come up with new strategies together to deliver the job by the deadline.

Staff that dont follow deadlines, before we fire them we give them this image to put on their desktop, and ask them to read it three times a day

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c) Time bomb System - When something goes wrong you need to fix it so it doesnt happen again. Some people call it "I am putting out a fire", but putting it out without making sure it doesnt happen again. Using the McDonalds scenario, the manager would have to put a system in place for Sara on how to handle custom orders by politely rejecting them. If the manager resolves the problem but doesnt address Sara, this situation can happen again.

We have a Time Bomb system that goes like this:

Stage 1 - Ball dropped, system failure, investigate what happened and defuse the time bomb.

Stage 2 - Stage 1 wasnt defused or the fix wasnt good enough now the customer is even more upset.

Stage 3 - If we dont resolve the problem by a certain deadline date, the customer will request a refund.

Stage 4 - Customers is threatening a refund but if we can resolve the problem immediately we might be able to save them.

Stage 5 - Customer left no way of getting them back.

The reason we called it a Time bomb because there is a real DEAD LINE (not a flexible one). If the line is crossed the Time will be up and the whole thing will explode, thus its called a deadline (because youre dead).

It is not often we get Time bombs with all the systems we have in place today, but they do occasionally happen when the projects are complex. When this happens either the CEO or COO or CTO has to get involved and waste their non-existent time. The problem is not how to resolve the issue, the problem is understanding the issue and what has happened from the beginning up until today. We refer to it as the train got derailed, so now we have how to understand what happened so the next train doesnt get derailed, and we need to put the train back on the rails.

We found a new tool to handle the time bombs using a software called Lucid Charts. Lucid Charts is like Google Docs meets Microsoft Visio. You can create a cross functional chart, share it with the whole team, and have everyone on the team that had anything to do with the project enter what they believe happened.

Usually I have the account manager gather all the details, enter it in the chart, suggest what we need to do to fix the situation and put the train back on the rails and present it to me.

Now instead of spending one hour per time bomb, the executive team can spend only five minutes to approve the resolution of a time bomb, and spend the rest of the time fixing the process of the system so it doesnt happen again.