How May I Help You?

On a recent overseas flight, one of our attendants noticed a toddler who kept dropping his pacifier. Every time he dropped it, he would cry, and either his mother or another passenger would retrieve the pacifier, or the flight attendant would get it as she walked by. Finally, the attendant picked up the pacifier, attached it to a ribbon, and sewed it to the child's shirt. The child was happy, the mother was happy, and the passengers nearby gave the attendant a standing ovation for solving the problem so cleverly.

That kind of personal attention makes all the difference in the world.

Yap Kim Wah joined Singapore Airlines Ltd. in 1975. The airline recently launched a major customer-service initiative called "Transforming Customer Service," which encourages staff to "step out of the conventional for the good of the customer." Each year, the airline brings in revenues of $4.6 billion and flies 12.7 million passengers around the world.

James Briscoe

Courier
Federal Express Corp.
Boston, Massachusetts

I treat my route as if it were my own business. And if I were running a business, I'd want customers to feel that they were dealing with somebody who is friendly, professional, and helpful.

Just last week, a customer stopped me on the street and asked me how to reach our main office by subway. She'd left her home for a short time and had missed a really important delivery, so our office was holding a package for her. I told her that if she could wait, I'd deliver it to her door the very next day.

But she needed the package by noon that day. She didn't have a car, and she was new to the area. I thought about how complicated it would be for her to take the subway and then walk the rest of the way to our office. So I told her to give me 15 minutes, and I would get the package and be right back with it. You can imagine how happy she was.

But I didn't help her out because I was looking for a pat on the back. I just did what I could to help a customer in a tough situation. You want to do the right thing for people. You want to put yourself in their shoes, as if you were the one asking for help. Part of customer service is the great feeling that you get when you see that you've made a difference.

James Briscoe, a courier with Federal Express since 1986, has served Boston's North End for the past three years. (In that role, he delivers an average of 25 packages each day to Fast Company. "When Fast Company became part of my route, I realized that I needed a bigger truck," says Briscoe, who appears at our door promptly at 9:20 each morning.) Throughout the world, there are about 47,000 FedEx couriers; together, they deliver more than 3 million packages each workday.

Anthony Lye

President and CEO
NoWonder Inc.
Sunnyvale, California

Sometimes the only way to improve customer service is to change the model that you use. Take technical support. The most frustrated customer has to be the one who's trying to fix a computer glitch. Why? Because it's service providers, rather than customers, who dictate the terms and the level of service. And that service is almost always both expensive and difficult to find. So the customers are unhappy -- and, what's more, so are the service providers: They're not paid much, and they don't like the way that their work is structured. Most tech-support people leave their jobs after only 18 months.

That's a no-win model. We're trying to change that by offering tech support through an online network. We're like a big dating service, hooking up customers and providers. It's fast and personal. You get to know the name of your tech-service provider, and you don't have to go through the standard set of 20 questions every time you need help. You have a place to go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; you can choose from among 5,000 experts -- and find an answer to your problem. And the providers are happy too, because suddenly they've got freedom. They can choose when and how they'll work, and they have the opportunity to earn a lot of money.

The result? We have earned customer-satisfaction ratings of more than 90%. We're resolving about 50,000 questions each month, and more than 70% of them are solved in an hour or less.

Anthony Lye (anthony@nowonder.com) held positions at Remedy Corp. and Tivoli Systems Inc., among other companies, before joining NoWonder Inc. in 1998. NoWonder, founded in 1997, is the first online-support marketplace on the Web. It has received many awards, including a 1999 "Best-in-Class" Users Choice Award, given jointly by "Customer Support Management" magazine and "RealMarket Research," an online newsletter.