Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1300 square foot comic and games store in Williston Park, New York.  This week, Riley completes his series on customer service.

Sorry for another long gap between articles.  Between the GAMA Trade Show, Free Comic Book Day, building a house, three kids, more events at the store than we've ever run...I hit a wall...big time.  I'll write more about that next time.  But for the moment I wanted to finish up some thoughts about customer service.

The first thought I had while reading that article on the BusinessWeek Best Customer Service List.  The top company on the list was USAA, an insurance and financial services company set up to serve veterans, current members of the armed forces, and their families.  We use USAA and I can tell you that their customer service is simply amazing.  BusinessWeek profiled how they train their customer service representatives and it was really interesting.  Since they have to appreciate the positions of the active soldiers that they're often on the phone with, customer service trainees often eat military MREs for meals and are routinely 'shipped out' from one area of the building to another, allowing them to at least have a feel for the daily life of a member of the armed forces.

What was really interesting though was that only about 15% of USAA's customer service reps actually come from the military.  My first assumption was that they would hire extensively from the military, so that their customer service people would be intimately familiar with the needs and situations of their customers.  But 85% of their people actually come from a completely different background and are trained to appreciate the needs of their customers.  They took people with no knowledge of their customers' needs and trained them to be the absolutely dominant customer service force in the country.

This made me think about our industry.  It seems that we hire almost exclusively comics or games fans and then try to train them to be customer service-oriented to the general public.  After all, we think, how can our employees answer questions if they don't know all about our products?  Sure there's obviously some truth to this, but does this really work?  And what choice do we really have?  As small business owners we need to trust the people who work for us.  And let's face it, most of the people coming into our stores looking for work are fans of the hobby to begin with or they wouldn't be interested in working there.  Still, it raises some interesting questions as to whether we're putting the cart before the horse.

The second thing that struck me was in a customer service situation I had recently. We've all had bad customer service from a random employee of many big box retailers.  Let's face it, that 17-year-old just really doesn't care too much about his performance at Target.  He'll work for Best Buy next, and Blockbuster after that.  But in this particular example it was the orientation of an entire company that made me think.

Over the past twelve years or so I've purchased quite a few computers from Gateway.  Initially it was due to their respect in the industry.  But as Dell and others emerged, I found that I liked having a Gateway store a mile from the house and another a mile from my business.  I had spent many hours on the phone with a foreign customer service rep from Compaq, and really liked being able to speak to someone in person.  Now I could have built a computer from scratch if I wanted to.  I'm no genius, but it's not that hard.  But I bought from Gateway because I wanted the convenience of support and handholding so I could spend my time running my business, not building computers.

Recently we had a problem with our newest machine that made me think I might have to replace the motherboard.  So I called Gateway to order the part.  Since it was a relatively new machine I thought this wouldn't be a problem, but was surprised to find that they no longer stocked it.  Still, with the way tech changes these days I wasn't too surprised.  So I asked them to give me an equivalent part, which they said they couldn't.  I asked them to recommend an equivalent part. They couldn't.  In fact, repeatedly the only thing they said to me was that since the computer was almost three years old, they could sell me a smokin' new system instead.  But that's not what I wanted.  I wanted a $75 motherboard for my POS machine.  I didn't need my cash register to be editing videos.  I just wanted them to support their product like they had, but as a company they had decided that they needed to show that they were cutting edge.  As a result, they literally told me that if I didn't want to buy a new system, I'd have to go to someone else to support the one I already had from them.  The killer though was when they sent me an email customer service survey to fill out.  I filled it out and returned it saying that due to the customer service experience I just had that I would never buy another Gateway again (actually I just bought another Dell a few weeks ago).  I thought for sure that would get some sort of response, but I never heard from them.

While this may seem extreme, it got me to thinking.  Gateway literally had no clue why I had bought from them in the first place.  My needs certainly weren't cutting edge tech, or I would have been buying very high end systems elsewhere.  I bought from them because of the service they had provided.  But somewhere along the line, as a company they had decided that their customers wanted something else. 

I'm a big proponent of constant improvement in our stores.  But sometimes I wonder if we veer away too far from our core mission.  I spoke with one of my customers last week and he told me that the primary reason he shops with us was because he knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that any book he wanted would be put aside for him, and that we would treat him and his collecting choices with respect.  All the other stuff we did was just gravy. If we didn't do that core competency perfectly, nothing else would matter.  It was a timely reminder that we have to always remember that what's really important to our customers is what should be important to us.