These are the reasons I keep up with Twitter—so that I know this week is National Customer Service Week (thanks @perks!). Perfect timing, as I’ve been thinking a lot about how companies go right (and oh so wrong) online.

Example #1: FreshDirect/Asking for Feedback
I love FreshDirect. Now, I understand that some of you may not know about FreshDirect, having the misfortune to live somewhere outside of the NYC delivery zone. If you don’t know it/love it yet, FreshDirect is an online supermarket that delivers directly to your house, 5th floor walk up and all. Although I’m sure I could spend an entire post lauding their intuitive layout, informative emails, and incredibly delicious foods, today I want to talk about their surveys.

More than any other company I know, FreshDirect asks its customers for feedback on everything from the appearance of their delivery personnel to the freshness of their fruit and vegetables. They use a service called Linescale that lets you place choices next to each other on a continuum, which I find much more intuitive than a Likert-type scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree. But that’s neither here nor there—I fill each survey out diligently and thoughtfully because they actually change their service, based on the survey results. Amazing! Four days after I completed my survey online, I got an email in my inbox describing the results and a list of 10 improvements they were making in response.

This sounds simple—ask your customers for feedback, listen, and adjust your service accordingly—but it’s rarely implemented. It made me think: what if all companies sincerely asked for feedback from users, and actually made changes based on the results?

Example #2: The Container Store/Seamless Online-Offline Experience
I love the Container Store. They have exactly what I’m looking for, every time. While I think their online store could be easier to navigate, their customer service truly gets it right when it comes to merging the online and offline experience. An example: only after I bought my apartment did I understand that it only has two closets—not a lot of storage for a girl who likes to color-code her sweaters. Looking to make the most out of my limited space, I went to the Container Store to design some closet solutions (hold off on judging me, just for a second…). In the store they made me a perfect system that I managed to install myself. So I did the same thing for my office closet—this time on the phone.

Now I’m moving things around and needed to adapt a few things. I went online, added everything to my cart, but when I went to check out I had a question. So I called customer service, and here is where the magic begins. First, my customer service rep, whom I’ll call Donna, pulled up all of my existing designs—both the one designed in the store and the one from the phone. Then she accessed my online shopping cart, added a few impulse items I picked out while we chatted, checked for product availability at the 6th avenue store, took my payment, and set up a time later that day when I could pick the entire order up.

Again, it sounds so easy—of course the store should be able to view your past transactions, access your current online list, and see stock in their retail locations. But it never happens. Retail locations are more often like little fiefdoms run by jealous tyrants (“Oh, no, we don’t have that here. You could call around to other stores in the area…” “Could you just check?” “No, I can’t.”); corporate headquarters generally seem to have no connection to their stores (“Well, you can buy that online…” “I’m actually next to a store, can you tell me if it’s there?” “No, sorry, I can’t do that.”); and online *never* integrates with offline (“well, I’m looking for the one that matches the one I bought online a week ago.” “Oh, then you’ll have to do that online. We don’t have access to that system.”).

I guess I understand how these bureaucracies can build up, with systems layered on systems, not communicating with each other, but the Container Store gives us a glimpse of how the future can be.

Example #3: Clicktime/Creepy
At EchoDitto, we use a time-tracking system called Clicktime. Mostly, I find it incredibly frustrating, but I think it’s part my fault: trying to remember how I broke my time out into all of my different clients; and partly their fault: a tedious interface and slow response times. I was griping to colleagues on Twitter: “Why do I find clicktime so tedious? Any tricks to make it better?” My colleagues didn’t come through this time, instead I got a message from Clicktime themselves: “@akeenan Can we help you? Please email support@clicktime.com.” Creepy.

I understand rationally that Clicktime customer service probably searches Twitter every day or so for mentions of its products, and responds directly. I appreciate that technique in spirit. In practice, however, it feels like being caught by the teacher passing notes. “Do you have something to share with the whole class, Ms. Keenan?” Uh, no? I was just talking to my friends?

Also, I didn’t appreciate that the onus was put back on me to follow up. At least send me a link to tips, or respond to my comment directly. A general suggestion to contact customer service is exactly what I don’t need.

Summary
It feels amazing when a company really puts clients first—thinking through how to make shopping online and offline a seamless experience for the customer, or asking for feedback and then really listening to it. What if we all stopped for a minute to ask our clients what works and what doesn’t, and then adapted our practices to make their experience as enjoyable as possible?

Probably a lot more sentences that begin with “I love.”