Find service stars
With 70,000 new customers jumping on the Beachbody bandwagon weekly, Product Partners’ 300 employees can’t handle the sales volume — which totaled $350 million in 2009. The company also uses third-party vendors for giant spikes in demand, especially during infomercials.
Whether or not your customer-facing forces are full-time employees, the key is training everyone to the same standards for a consistent customer experience. But first, make sure you’re training the right people — ones who care about your customers and your standards.
“One of the keys to our success is that we’ve worked hard with our vendors to make them better so we’re better,” Congdon says. “We don’t just farm out work to our third-party vendors. We create standards … and we choose vendors who are willing to work with us like that. I almost said, ‘be managed like that,’ but really, that’s not the way it is. You’ve got to find a vendor who wants to work with you.”
It starts with a clear explanation of what you expect. That will weed out the self-selecting few who know they don’t match and secure a better fit with the rest.
“It’s really common for a vendor to tell you that they’re beating industry standard,” Congdon says. “And then we have to say, ‘We just don’t care what the industry standard is because we’re trying to create a new industry. We’re in the industry that wants a zero percent [error rate].”
Explain why those expectations are important. When searching for people who will serve your customers best, that means answering why your standards matter to customers.
“We need to have a zero-error environment because … if they let themselves get to a point where they have 70 pounds to lose, they are very quick to find any excuse not to work with a company that’s going to ask them to work hard to lose that 70 pounds,” Congdon tells candidates. “So we have to get out of the way. The product coming late or somebody rude on the phone or whatever and they’re gone.”
The second step in identifying customer service stars is an attitude check. Optimists are the best match for the customer-centric culture at Beachbody because that upbeat positivity translates into a more enjoyable interaction for the customer.
“You’re not going to have somebody say, ‘Eh, I don’t like life,’ in an interview,” he says. “The pessimist is going to tell you what was wrong with every company they’ve been to and how what they tried to do couldn’t get done and it was always somebody else’s fault.
“Hopefully they’re willing to share a little bit of the blame. I’m perfectly willing to hear from somebody how they’ve learned from their mistakes. But the people who seem to have never made any mistakes, those are the dangerous ones.”
People who share the blame for past mistakes are more likely to take initiative in solving future problems for the sake of the customer.
“We don’t accept anything less than 100 percent,” Congdon says. “It’s easy to say we are great because we’re 99 percent, but if you’re thinking about the customer then you’re thinking about the 1 percent who didn’t get the product as quickly as they were supposed to.”
