I had a great customer experience recently with an online backup and storage company, Carbonite (www.carbonite.com). I’ve been looking for an inexpensive online backup site for my home computer, and Carbonite is very reasonably priced (cheap, in fact) at $55 per year. And the service offered the basic capabilities I wanted--automatic backup, only backing up deltas, easy retrieval, etc. Plus, they offer a 15-day free trial.
I decided to try it. But I hit a glitch trying to download the app. I had to close my browser, and I went back to the Web site. There was a button for support via live chat, so I hit the button.
Shirley was the support rep who helped me out. I won’t go into the details, but she stayed in the chat with me for 42 minutes, due to some technical problems with my system, until I was up and running and all my questions (such as, how do I back up only selected files, etc.) were answered. There was no sales pitch or impatience (at least in the tone of the chat).
So I left the chat with a warm, cozy feeling towards Shirley and Carbonite. I filled in a feedback form commending her service and persistence. And I was ready to blog a nice post--which would probably have ended here.
Except that I started thinking about what that 42 minutes of customer support cost Carbonite. Yes, they got a customer, but let’s do the math. The yearly fee is $55; so, say I become a lifetime customer, 20 years or so, that’s still only $1100. How can the company afford this type of personal service for such little reward?
Well, word of mouth like this is one way that to recoup the investment. Also, I suspect that most people aren’t as clueless about troubleshooting downloads as I am, so there aren’t that many times that Shirley and her peers need to spend big chunks of time getting a free trial going. But I still wonder if it will ultimately be worth it to Carbonite.
You need to have a balance between great customer service and lifetime customer value as an ROI. Perhaps it might have been cheaper to provide more guidance online on what to do if a download doesn’t work. I didn’t notice a lot of self-service download information when I went back to the site.
You need to think about the cost of hand-holding novice prospects verses with amount of revenue you are likely to see from those potential customers. I know that this is contrary to everything I’ve been saying for years, but it isn’t always the best thing to give customers everything they want--they want all your time and product, for free, forever! You can’t stay in business that way.
I recommend that Carbonite and other companies that offer low-cost services really do a close examination of what type of self-support can be available before a potential customer switches to assisted- (and costly) service. Of course, the self-service support has to be easy to find, easy to access, easy to understand, and accurate. And, of course, it should be really easy to escalate to assisted-service. But if the self-service is great, there will be fewer assisted-service requests.
All in all, however, I’m a very happy customer--yes, I’m paying up, and it’s thanks to Shirley!
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