The LiveChat That Turned into a Collaboration With Blizzard Entertainment
How Customer Service Won The Deal
As the owner of a ecommerce business, Design By Humans, I pride our company and culture on on being agile, lean, and able to move quickly.
Over one year ago I read an article from Ron Burely titled, “The $4 Million Complaint Call”. It really resonated with me as the owner of a ecommerce website with a customer service team. So much so, that I emailed it directly to everyone on my team so that they too could see how powerful it was to have fanatical customer support.
The gist is to pay attention to every customer, like they’re your last. Make them feel our culture so much so that they will be a lifetime customer.
One morning, our development team had just deployed some shipping functionality changes which effected some of our FedEx shipping services. We tested, we QA’ed, we did everything we normally do for a deployment that affects the checkout system. As it turns out, we did have a small bug that went unnoticed.
Enter Customer Service LiveChat.
Our brand new customer service manager had a human (yes, we call them humans) asking a question via LiveChat. The customer asked, “Why is there no shipping charge for my order?” Since he was new and only a yell away from me, he asked me if I knew what the problem was. I knew that the development team had just deployed a change last night and that this California-FedEx-SmartPost-only bug more then likely had to do with the most recent changes.
I’m not one for loosing a sale, even if it’s just for one or two tees, so I ran from my front office, through the warehouse, back to where the development team was located at the time. I told our Sr. Software Engineer what the problem was and he knew immediately. He fixed it within 60 seconds and I was running back to the front office to tell our CSR that he should tell the guy to proceed.
By the time I ran back through the development room, through the warehouse and into the front offices, our customer had already left LiveChat, but we had his email.
The Customer Service Manager followed up through email letting him know to feel free to checkout as the California-FedEx-SmartPost-only bug was squashed.
The next morning, I walk to my desk where our CSR promptly comes to speak with me. He says, “remember that LiveChat we had yesterday with the California-FedEx-SmartPost-only bug?” to which I responded, yes. Well, as it turns out, the acutely aware customer service representative recognized the inquiry name in the email as the Creative Director at Blizzard Entertainment.
Our team member continues the email conversation with the creative director for Blizzard with some direction by me, which lead to lunch, a flight to L.A. for a meeting, which ultimately led to us receiving a licensing deal with one of the biggest gaming companies on the planet.
If it wasn’t for our sharp representative, who has since been promoted multiple times faster than anyone in our company, great customer service, and treating every customer like they’re our last, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to work with one of the biggest video game juggernauts in the industry.
