Little guy customer service, revisited

It’s so refreshing when you a see a company get things right. The other day I wrote about how large companies are usually the wrong place to look for models of customer service. Just after that, I experienced another example of a small company beating the pants off of the big guys in quality of customer support.

I decided to try the grocery delivery service from Rice Epicurean Markets, a small local grocery chain. Rice Epicurean is the kind of grocery store most cities once had: it started as a local shop and is still owned by members of its founding family; you can still set up a house charge account there; and even the name is local (referring to Rice Boulevard, where their first store opened up near the Rice Institute, which is now Rice University).

It’s also the only local grocery store that has a home delivery service, which amazes me; when I lived in Washington I used Peapod through one of the big local chains and it was great, and I’ve missed that. I was shocked that none of the larger chains in Houston offered this.

Whenever I order online from a small company I’m a bit wary; nobody seems to have the whole online shopping process working as reliably as outfits like Amazon. And indeed, the ordering system was slightly clunky. But here’s where the magic happened: in the middle of putting my grocery order together on their web site, I had a question about the process. I couldn’t find an answer there, so I clicked the “email us” button and fired off a message.

About two minutes later, as I was surveying the selection of breakfast cereals, I got a reply. I would have expected a canned email coming from “Rice Epicurean Home Delivery Service” informing me that my email had been received and my patronage was valuable and someday someone would reply. But this was an email from Phil Cohen, their VP of home delivery, which a concise and helpful answer to my question. It came from his personal email address. It included a phone number.

You know, I have gone through endless Kafkaesque chains of canned emails from GoDaddy that make it clear no human being has even read my question. T-Mobile has told me that they get too many emails so they won’t bother to answer. And this small grocery chain in Houston answered my question in 2 minutes. The lesson: all the resources in the world won’t help if you don’t make responding to customers a priority.

I placed my order, it arrived as expected, which made me very happy; I don’t like going to the grocery store. Right after it arrived, I got another email, asking me to complete a survey (which I did). The survey included space for comments, and I had one I wanted to share. (Comcast asks you if you’re satisfied, lets you pick “yes” or “no,” and doesn’t accept any comments.) Another point for Rice Epicurean - ask the customer what they think, if you really want to know.

Then a few days later, I got another email. This one was obviously a standard message that goes out to all new customers, but it was a good one for a couple of reasons.

First, instead of just saying, “thanks, come again,” it included some suggestions: combine orders and place them less often, so you can save money on delivery charges. If you’re out of town, use the web to order before you come home, so your groceries arrive just after you do. We know the first order involves a lot of searching, but remember that all those items are saved so it’ll be faster next time. There were also some codes to get free deliveries on future orders. It was a useful email.

And most importantly, it came from a human being, with her name, her title, her phone number, and her personal email address. None of the “do not reply, this address does not accept incoming message” nonsense that so many big companies do - which always seems like an elaborate way to say, “Dear customer, just get out of our face and leave us alone, okay?”

In a world of ever-declining customer service, Rice Epicurean made my week. Obviously, someone there understands the fundamentals of customer service - responding to customer needs, prioritizing those responses, and treating interactions as two-way communications.

If you add resources and technology to that, you can have a much larger customer service operation that satisfies a huge customer base. But if you lack those fundamentals, all that investment will just give you an ability to alienate your customers on a truly epic scale, along the lines of AT&T.

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