From a recent Globe and Mail news item, an interview with the founder of Lee Valley:
" What I find most amazing is watching Canadian and American businesses farm out their customer service. You might as well put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. It’s Russian roulette if you farm it out.
Why?
Because the [outsource specialists] don’t know your business and they don’t know the culture. When you’ve farmed out customer service, you’ve lost the connection with the customer, and you will eventually die a horrible economic death.
So you will never outsource customer service?
Never. You will never find, I hope, a screened telephone call when you phone Lee Valley. Anybody who has called me in the past 30 years was put through without asking what they were calling about or what their name was.
When you have a customer who gets directly though to a senior officer in a firm, it’s like a dog that’s caught a car. The customer doesn’t know what to do now that he or she has hope.
They’ll say, ‘But I didn’t expect to get through to the president.’
‘Well, you got through. What can I do for you?’
‘Well, it wasn’t really that big of a problem.’
‘It must be a problem. What can we do?’
So you’ve won the battle just by not putting up screens and blockages between you and your customers.
Lee Valley is a $100 million company, not the multi-billion-dollar companies that draw hostile comments here for their lacklustre customer service. But the 70-year-old founder thinks it’s a myth that big firms have to outsource.
Full story here:
Google : "From stoves to scalpels, a career retooler" then read the cached version
" What I find most amazing is watching Canadian and American businesses farm out their customer service. You might as well put a gun to your head and pull the trigger. It’s Russian roulette if you farm it out.
Why?
Because the [outsource specialists] don’t know your business and they don’t know the culture. When you’ve farmed out customer service, you’ve lost the connection with the customer, and you will eventually die a horrible economic death.
So you will never outsource customer service?
Never. You will never find, I hope, a screened telephone call when you phone Lee Valley. Anybody who has called me in the past 30 years was put through without asking what they were calling about or what their name was.
When you have a customer who gets directly though to a senior officer in a firm, it’s like a dog that’s caught a car. The customer doesn’t know what to do now that he or she has hope.
They’ll say, ‘But I didn’t expect to get through to the president.’
‘Well, you got through. What can I do for you?’
‘Well, it wasn’t really that big of a problem.’
‘It must be a problem. What can we do?’
So you’ve won the battle just by not putting up screens and blockages between you and your customers.
Lee Valley is a $100 million company, not the multi-billion-dollar companies that draw hostile comments here for their lacklustre customer service. But the 70-year-old founder thinks it’s a myth that big firms have to outsource.
Full story here:
Google : "From stoves to scalpels, a career retooler" then read the cached version
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