How Ali Asaria built one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies by developing a kick-ass customer service culture – and how you can, too…
We’re back with the newest edition of ‘Fireside Chats with Fiery Entrepreneurs’! Our topic for this interview is “How to blow your customers away by delivering exceptional customer experiences”. The reason I chose this topic is that I believe that one of the best ways small companies can stand out and compete with larger companies is through personalized, caring customer service. Most large companies are too slow and bureaucratic to make sure every single customer is treated well and taken care of. So – no matter what industry you’re in – there’s always a great opportunity for your young company to excel at customer service when you’re looking to build and maintain a loyal customer base.
To learn more about this topic I invited Ali Asaria, founder and CEO of Well.ca, Canada’s largest online health and beauty store, to join us and picked his brain on how his company delivers exceptional customer experiences. Well.ca, widely known for its strong customer service culture, ranked No. 19 in the 2009 issue of Profit Magazine’s “Top 50 fastest-growing companies in Canada”.
Ali is a technologist who is passionate about making Well.ca run on the most innovative software possible while simultaneously building the most friendly, compassionate company culture possible. Prior to founding Well.ca, Ali worked at Research In Motion (RIM) where he independently developed the most popular Blackberry game, BrickBreaker, which is now on more than 15 million devices worldwide.
So, here’s the interview:
Faheem Moosa: Ali, I’m delighted you could join us today – thanks very much. Well.ca is known for its strong customer service culture. Was this a conscious decision you made early on, or has your customer service philosophy evolved over time?
Ali Asaria: The answer is that it’s a bit of both. It was a conscious decision and a bit unconscious for us. The original source for our customer-oriented culture came from the actual culture of our employees. We brought together a team of really kind, caring people that wanted to be kind to our customers – wanted to talk to them, wanted to learn about how their lives are and wanted to build a service that our customers would really care about. And as we grew and scaled, we asked ourselves how we could maintain the same, local-store feel with a bigger team and a bigger company. And some of that involved codifying some of the values we considered to be important when we were small and ensuring that we maintain them as we grew bigger.
My father owns the largest independent pharmacy here in Guelph. The way we learned about how to run a pharmacy was looking at this local, independent pharmacy and seeing how they did business here. One of the things we learned when we asked customers why they go to my dad’s pharmacy, they’d say that my dad remembers their names, knows their kids, etc. We learned that it’s more of a personal and community relationship rather than a customer and business relationship. That was something we wanted to maintain at Well.ca.
FM: Describe some of Well.ca’s customer service initiatives that have delighted its customers. Which of these initiatives are you most proud of, and why?
AA: I’ll tell you about some of the main things that we do and the things that I’m most proud of. One of the things that we do is, first of all, we have a 1-800 number on every page. That’s rare with e-commerce companies. A lot of e-commerce companies don’t want you to contact their staff because they consider it a time-waster. We try and go the opposite route. We encourage our customers to connect with us via chat, email or phone. In addition to that, we don’t time our phone calls – we tell our people to talk to customers as long as is necessary. It allows for some more conversation – sometimes customers just want to chat for a little while and we love to engage our customers this way.
In addition, we do a couple of neat things in our actual service. If you’ve looked at our site, we do free shipping on all orders – without a minimum. That’s one of the features in our product that we feel is extremely customer-friendly. Our customers respond extremely positively to that. In addition, we do something really neat that I like and our customers love – we pay for return shipping. So if there’s anything in an order you don’t want, we pay for that. And all those things are elements of the business that other companies just don’t like doing. Our philosophy is to make service as friendly as possible and build a business model around friendliness rather than add friendliness as an after-thought.
Another neat thing we do is that every single order that leaves our warehouse leaves with a hand-written note. Of all the things that we do, this is probably the thing that customers respond to the most. Every single order that leaves Well.ca leaves with a hand-written note that says ‘Thank you for your order’ and people just love that because there’s a human element to that.
A whole bunch of companies out there claim to have really great customer service. We believe that saying you have good customer service is like saying you have good technology; while a whole bunch of companies do have great technology, there’s a personality and style to it that’s really important. And, for us, customer service, beyond just being important to us, it’s not just something we can put in a bullet list and say, “Here’s the 5 things we do and that’s why we’re good at customer service”. Customer service is infused into every element of the way we treat our business – everything from the way we work with our distributors and suppliers, investors and the way we treat our staff internally. We built a culture where the customer is considered in every single decision that we make. What then ends up happening is that a whole bunch of good things happen that we didn’t plan for, because everyone values customers so much.
One of the things that I’m really proud of is our response when a customer once requested Turtles chocolates. At that time we didn’t sell chocolates, as we were a Health & Beauty store. But the employee who was dealing with this customer went across the street and bought some Turtles just for this customer. And the customer was so happy she called back crying, because her mother who had passed away recently always used to send her Turtles during Christmas time. Our package arrived around Christmas time too, so it really meant a lot to this customer. This is just an example of something you can’t really plan to make happen, but the idea of caring for our customers runs so deep within our company that our people do things that are not expected of them.
FM: What challenges have you faced while building a strong customer service culture amidst rapid growth? Is there anything you would have done differently?
AA: I think that one of the things that we’ve worried about constantly is, how do we scale the really personal relationship we have with our customers as our company grows and as our customer service team grows – that’s always something that’s been top of mind. For example, the hand-written notes are one of those things that our investors and others always ask us about and say, ‘Sure you can do that when you have 25 orders a day, but what happens when you have hundreds of orders a day?’ But we’ve been able to maintain these initiatives because we’ve identified them as so important to our business and built models to support them. One thing that’s really important is that we use technology to support some of the forms of customer care that we do. For example, we wrote our own ‘Live chat’ software so that we’re able to – in real time – chat with visitors on our website. The use of technology allows us to have a lot of contact with a lot of customers and scale our customer service initiatives.
I don’t know if there’s anything we would’ve done differently but there’s a whole bunch of things that we learned over time. As our team has grown, we’ve done a really good job of codifying what we consider to be our core values in customer service. So, we actually have a training manual and a training process. Some of those things happened very organically in the past, but now there are more formal or written descriptions of what we consider to be good customer service.
FM: What tools, systems or processes do you recommend entrepreneurial companies make use of to deliver extraordinary customer experiences?
AA: We use a lot of social media to keep in contact with our customers – we have a Facebook page where people can ask us questions, stay in touch with our staff and view our videos. We also use Twitter and video websites just to keep people updated about what’s happening here and to give them insight as to what our culture’s like. Beyond social media, we also use technology that gives customers insight into what’s happening with their orders – they’re updated frequently about the status of their orders, etc. and found that that’s proven to be extremely important to our customers. All of the software we use is developed internally – we’re a technology company so we’re able to develop these tools that allow us to provide great customer service.
FM: How does Well.ca measure its customer service initiatives and ensure a high return on investment from each initiative?
AA: I think the most important thing is that we try not to quantitatively measure our customer service because we think that would create biases in the way we deliver a great customer experience. For example, we don’t time our phone calls. You can imagine the parallel of a local pharmacy or a grocery store – when you have a great experience at a local store, it’s probably not because they have some metric for how to determine great customer service. What they actually do is that they hire really caring, kind and courteous people. We try to maintain the same values. The way we’ve been able to have great customer service is by asking ourselves, ‘How do we build a great team of people that really care about customers?’ That’s more of a qualitative question. What we end up doing to make sure that we are consistently delivering on customer service is constantly meeting with our customer care team – that’s a recommendation that I can make to all companies. Your customer care team is on the front lines so we (both management and tech teams) spend a lot of time with them to understand issues that are trending, etc. Just by having conversations with the customer care team, we’re able to gain a lot of insight into how we’re doing in terms of delivering great experiences.
I think one of the things I’ve learned at Well.ca that I think can transfer to a lot of different companies is that a lot of times, companies have management initiatives to improve customer service where they’ll have a whole bunch of metrics to understand whether or not that’s happening. But, I think in order for customer care to be truly great in a company, it has to come from senior management. It has to come right from the top in terms of being a core value to the company. What I see often is that a company will often see customer service as a potential source of revenue, so they will prioritize it. But the problem with that kind of logic is that customer care is still secondary to the idea of revenue and profit. So what ends up happening is that sometimes the two notions can be pitted against each other. And I think what’s important for other companies to adopt is to be able to separate the two and consider both making profit and delivering great customer service as primary objectives. That message should come from management and trickle down to every team member. What then ends up happening is that it empowers every team member to find new ways to deliver better experiences.
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