LCI Paper is a Better Business Bureau accredited business. As of November 10, 2008, LCI enjoys an A rating with the independent organization. To follow up on the company’s A rating accomplishment, I spent a few minutes with the owner and those team members that among their other responsibilities, handle customer service for the company.
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Here is a transcript of the interview segments:
Here’s Barry Levine, on the different types of customer needs he might handle when answering his phone:
“The calls might range from helping a person enter an order to trying to navigate them…themselves to entering an order or calculating shipping charges or telling them how long it’s going to take for an order to get out the door, all of which is pretty much stated on the web site, but again, it boils down to having a physical presence behind the product that someone is purchasing.”
Linda Giesin on the types of calls she receives:
“You know, goes from people just wanting general information, looking for a sample, looking for ideas, wanting to place an order because they don’t feel comfortable doing it online. You know, we’re more than happy to help customers place their orders if they’re not feeling comfortable doing the internet. More and more people are more into it. A lot of the calls that I get are usually people who need things rushed. They want to see if they can get it out today even though it’s past 2 o’clock.”
As you’re learning, answering our phones is a priority for those of us who work in the office. Here’s Larry Chase on the importance of picking up the phone:
“I think it’s very important. Actually, Barry is like, he’s pretty adamant that people pick up the telephone. And he wants to make sure that every call is answered within a couple of rings and they’re given the time and the courtesy that each customer should get.”
Barry: “And again, it all stems from that same topic that is customer service. To answer it on an immediate ring or an immediate two rings is the only way that customers are going to realize that you’re there to support them with not just them purchasing the product but your ability to answer questions about the product they’re purchasing.”
Linda: “I think it’s important to pick up the calls immediately. And customers appreciate it.”
Indeed, answering phone calls and assisting our customers is of prime importance. I asked the staff about special cases where they had gone the extra mile to assist a customer. Here’s Amy Earl:
“Yeah, there was one woman that called a few weeks ago that didn’t have time to order a sample of the invitation that she was interested in. It was a translucent pochette and she was in a rush and she didn’t know… She wanted to have a photo printed on the front of the folder and then have the wording on the inside. So I suggested printing the photo on a vellum overlay and then printing the text on the card underneath. And I actually took photographs of two different ensembles and e-mailed them to her to see which one she liked better and she was very pleased with that and she seemed to be pretty happy and placed her order and I also helped her with a template for printing the vellum. Yeah, we were e-mailing back and forth for a while. She called me a couple times and she ended up pretty happy with…or very happy with her invitation. It was for her parents’ anniversary so she was running around and trying to get everything ready at the last minute.”
Barry: “There have been a handful of situations where people have wanted their orders out the door. It may have been between 4 and 5 o’clock and we’re just waiting for our truck driver to show up to get all of our orders and we push the order through. You know, we’ll hand deliver it out to the warehouse. We’ll put the order together ourselves if we have to. There are those instances. There are situations where people have struggled with the printing of their invitations and I’ve stayed on the phone with them for literally, you know, half hours to hours at a time just to try to walk them through setting it up or formatting or something as it relates to the printing of the invitations that they bought from us. We’re not just here selling a product. We’re supporting it as well.”
Here’s Will Collins:
“You know, usually people will order, or occasionally people will order something and they might not be aware that like cream and white don’t match, you know. And in that case, we’ll flag the order and bring it into the office and you guys can make sure that that’s what they ordered. Or a lot of times, people will order envelopes and cards that don’t quite match each other as far as size or, you know, the stock is different or something like that. That’s another thing that gets flagged and we’ll check with the customer just to make sure that that’s what they wanted. So it’s just kind of like a safety net I suppose you would say, for every order, to try to make sure that they’re getting what they wanted even if that’s not exactly what they ordered, so…which is pretty common, actually.”
I asked folks about pushing through last minute orders.
Barry: “I think we’ve got a pretty good track record when it comes to that. If we know that we’re still capable of getting an order out the door, then it’s our priority to do so. We may not promote that we’re shipping orders past 2 o’clock Eastern time, but we always are. And if somebody calls with a special request in that regard and it means receiving an order by Friday as opposed to the following Monday, then we’re going to get the order out the door.”
Amy: “Sometimes it comes really close to our cutoff time when they’ll call and UPS is already here or they’re like about to arrive and in that case we don’t have that much time to put the order together. But in most cases, we will run around and put the order together. Everyone will help out to do that. Like someone will process the order while someone’s getting it ready and in some cases we even ask the UPS driver to wait a few minutes or to come back like half an hour later to pick up a package that…an order that was placed later in the day.”
Will: “You know, our official cutoff time as far as shipping orders is 2 o’clock but we often will pack and ship right up until 5 o’clock, you know, or until UPS shows up. Like when someone will run out here with, you know, ‘I need to get this out’ sort of concern, if at all possible, even if I’m the only one here, or if we’ve only got, you know, a skeleton crew, we’ll try to get it out and pack it up as, you know, as quickly as we can, you know?”
Linda: “We do our best to keep going up until…even though the site says 2 o’clock, we do our best to keep processing orders, to get them out that day for the customers up until the time UPS comes. UPS shows up, sometimes we have him come back because we’re still working on orders for customers. But we put a lot of emphasis on getting as many orders out each day for the customers.”
Larry: “We’ll get it out. Basically the bottom line is if somebody needs it out and UPS hasn’t arrived we’ll get the order together and get it out. And if we need to, we’ve asked, and we have on many occasions, have UPS come back a little bit later to pick up so we can satisfy some of those end of day emergencies.”
Regarding LCI’s A rating with the Better Business Bureau:
Barry: “Oh, I think that it’s an accomplishment for everybody that works here because it wouldn’t happen if we weren’t a top notch company all the way down the line from taking an order to processing the order to packing the order to shipping the order to sending confirmations on our orders to the customers so that they know immediately that their order was shipped on a given day. All of what we do here supports that whole theme of customer service all the way down the road, and that’s why I feel that in any business, it really is the top priority.”
Will: “It makes me feel good, you know? It’s definitely good to get that rating from an independent accreditation bureau, so… I was actually reading a little bit about it yesterday, just to…’cause I don’t really know how they, you know, what their criteria is for giving out their grades and it seems to be pretty stringent, so I’m happy.”
Linda: “It shows that we are actually getting those orders right, getting them out on time, and, you know, customers like us, which is the most important thing.”
Amy: “I think that everyone, or at least I feel really rewarded when we can help everyone that calls during the day to make sure at the end of the day that everyone’s happy. That’s…it’s like I can go home feeling like we made our customers feel, you know, appreciated and happy.”
Linda: “I think we do put extra emphasis on helping customers.”
Barry: “If we’re not here to pick up phone calls, if we’re not here to respond to e-mail, if we’re not here to help a customer do something as simple as enter their order for them because of a phobia that they have with being on the internet and doing it themselves, then we’re not serving ourselves well. You know, our product, our delivery of product, our packaging of product, our answering phone calls, it’s all under that one big umbrella of customer service.”
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Recommended Links:
Better Business Bureau
LCI’s Accreditation Confirmation with the BBB
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Joshua Birch
josh@lcipaper.com
