A few weeks back Mike had a bad experience with Free Conference Call’s ‘customer service’ team via Twitter. It wasn’t a huge deal, but it was enough to warrant another post. Mike doesn’t usually like to be a complainer, but if there’s a marketing lesson to be learned, I’m not above it.
More recently Mike had a really great experience, compliments of Warby Parker.
Let’s start with this… Mike broke his glasses.
They were functional enough to sit on my face for a while but he knew he was going to need a new pair. Mike saw some of the really cool Instagram videos Warby Parker was putting out and he decided to give them a shot. He ordered my 5 pairs to try on (which costs you nothing) and sent out a tweet, mostly to see if any of my friends had tried the service before. Then this happened.
@WarbyParkerHelp you can’t put my old lenses in new frames can you?
— Mike Bal (@TheMikeBal) July 18, 2013
@WarbyParkerHelp But I can order those from you too if I know my prescription right?
— Mike Bal (@TheMikeBal) July 18, 2013
@WarbyParkerHelp I didn’t know they included lenses that’s SUPER awesome. I have my 5 pairs ordered to try on. You earned my money
— Mike Bal (@TheMikeBal) July 18, 2013
A couple of things Mike notice here:
1. Without me directly mentioning their account, they went out of the way to thank me for trying them out and offered any assistance Mike might need.
2. They answered my question clearly and even apologized for not being able to deliver on a request he knew was a reach in the first place.
Generally speaking, if he finds out his original plan wasn’t going to work, he tables the problem until he has time to come up with a new plan. In this instance, Warby Parker had done such a great job that he was determined to find a way to make it work. he asked one more question and got the perfect response and ended up ordering a new pair of glasses from them.
Let’s do a little math. Before he decided to make a purchase, they tweeted me directly 3 times. Being someone who works in social media, he can say that the average tweet (for an experienced tweeter) takes, at most, between 30-60 seconds to write and send. So, it took 3 minutes of customer service time to lock down a $90 sale.
If someone works 8 hours a day and focuses entirely on customer service for a company through Twitter, they can theoretically do this 20 times an hour or 1600 times a day, leading to $144,000 of revenue. He knows that there’s going to be downtime and research time for each case, but even if this happens 5-10% of the time, the person is bringing in around $7k-$14k a day. SMART BUSINESS DECISION.
