Legal Commentary

Customer Service In Action: A Great Story

By Patrick J. Lamb

Kayak.com is a way cool company.  If you travel and want to choose amongst the best options, rather than having the choice made for you, it is the best place to go.  But that's not why I am writing this post.  My partner Nicole Auerbach shared this great article about one of Kayak's founder's, Paul English.  It begins with this quote from English, surely designed to capture the attention of anyone who cares about customer service:

"When the phone rings, I jump over desks to get to it.  I love talking to customers, even angry ones."

But read on and you'll see the approach of someone who's serious about customer service:

"The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I'm smoking crack.  They say, "Why would you pay an engineer $150,000 to answer phones when you could pay someone in Arizona $8 an hour?" If you make the engineers answer emails and phone calls from the customers, the second or third time they get the same question, they'll stop what they're doing and fix the code.  Then we don't have those questions anymore.

There's so much more in the article, including the red phone story, that illustrates the thinking of someone who is into customer service. Great company, great article.

PS--Kayak is a client of ours, and Karen Klein, the company's General Counsel serves on our advisory board, so I don't claim neutrality here.  But I do use Kayak in planning my trips!

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on February 01, 2010 (boomark / email).