Metro One's databases are updated with fresh numbers in real time, all the time. Operators can send along complaints about wrong numbers. All kinds of searches are available. I saw one operator find a particularly elusive residential number by reading through a list of every person who lived on a street.
The Baby Bells shoot for directory calls lasting 17 to 20 seconds, total, compared to Metro One's 33-second standard. That, of course, is the difference. And as trivial as it may sound -- what's 15 seconds? -- companies know how to do the multiplication. At least, they know how to do it when it's their 15 seconds.
Metro One's Charlotte center handles roughly 275,000 calls a week. The math is easy. If each call lasts 33 seconds, as it does at Metro One, then 275,000 calls require 2,520 hours of operator time. If each call lasts 20 seconds, as it does at BellSouth, then 275,000 calls require only 1,528 hours of operator time.
It takes 50% more people to do it the Metro One way. To do it right.
For all of its struggles -- with its balance sheet, its stock, the union drive, and layoffs -- amazon.com has done one thing brilliantly: customer service. I placed my first order with amazon in 1997 and have been a steady customer since. In four years of making purchases for myself and for others, I've found what I needed, ordered it, received a flurry of emails about my orders, and then gotten either thank-you notes or what I ordered. I've never had to contact amazon about any matter. I have had, in essence, no customer service from amazon. Put another way, I have had such perfect customer service, the service itself has been transparent. That is exactly what amazon wants. The goal is perfect customer service through no customer service.
In a very short time, amazon has set a new standard for customer service, and I went to Seattle to see how. What I discovered is a place that regards customer service as an R&D lab -- a way not to help customers, but to help the company.
"We want to make it easier and easier for our customers to do business with us," says Bill Price, 50, vice president of global customer service for amazon. "We want to have everything go so right, you never have to contact us. To do that, we have to stay tuned up. We have to keep asking, What are the problems?"
Of course, every customer-service VP in america, every customer- service VP in history, would agree with those sentiments. Two things make all the difference at amazon: the view the company takes of customer service and customers, and the way the company is organized to drive home that view.
Amazon doesn't consider customer service to be the complaint department, or even the quality-control and customer-satisfaction department. amazon considers Bill Price's outfit to be a research lab for discovering how to adjust and improve customer service. And amazon considers customer service to be its core business. The company really offers nothing but customer service.
So every single encounter with a customer -- by phone, by email, even by clicking on Web pages -- is considered to be the source of potentially vital information about the course of the entire company.
How does that work?
Well, to start with, the company tracks the reason for every customer contact. It keeps a list of the top-ten reasons why customers contact the company -- monitoring the list daily, weekly, monthly -- and it is constantly working on ways to eliminate those reasons. For years, the number-one question that people asked amazon was, Where's my stuff? Now, on every page, starting with the welcome page, there's a box labeled, "Where's my stuff?"
Amazon's operations are so interwoven with customer-driven changes that employees are briefly baffled when you ask for examples.
"Two years ago," says Price, "one common problem was, 'I want to buy five books, and ship them to my five brothers, each at a separate address.' Our system was originally set up so that one order had to go to one address, forcing the customer, in a case like that, to place five separate orders. Now we have a 'ship-to-multiple-addresses' function. And you don't need to get in touch with us to figure it out."
Shortly after its consumer-electronics store debuted, amazon was deluged with requests for a simple chart that would compare the features and prices of similar products, such as mp3 players and digital cameras. As a result, amazon has developed a product-by-product "comparison engine" that does exactly that.
Just last year, a customer sent an email pointing out something that had bugged him for years: On the main ordering page, customers are instructed to enter their email address and their amazon password. Next come two options: "Forgot your password? Click here" and "Sign in using our secure server."
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