Some Reflections on Customer Service @SmartThings

I recently saw this tweet putting @smartthings, the company I co-founded, in the same category as Zappos, Amazon, Chick-fil-A a and Costco for customer service.

I don’t presume to have the credibility of a Tony Hsieh to opine on everything it takes to build an amazing service-oriented organization, but the tweet did cause me to pause and reflect on what we’ve done well, the structures and processes we put in place and some simple actions that I believe laid the foundation for our culture and our success.

Candidly, we’ve stopped doing some of these, or do them less frequently now. Maybe that’s okay and part of scaling up from a startup, but I’d encourage anyone starting a business or responsible for service in an existing business to think through a similar list for their business.

• Set a service intention - Early on as an organization, we set a specific intention with respect to service. We declared that our customer service operation was NOT a cost center to be optimized. Rather, we intended for the team to do everything required to help our customers turn their homes into smart homes. This meant service for us didn’t start and stop with our product. A huge part of what we do is help customers become successful with any smart product they use in their homes. We knew that the power of SmartThings in a consumer’s home would directly increase alongside the number of use cases and devices a user had connected. Therefore, helping a customer set up their third party camera or think through how to automate their sprinklers was an investment in creating a multi-year customer relationship. And those users would be advocates that would form the basis of massive word of mouth growth, meaning the ‘cost’ of that support was actually an investment in growth.
• CSAT over MTTC - This is really just a manifestation of the intention described above. One of the most critical measures for our service team is customer satisfaction (CSAT) with the service experience itself (distinct, but obviously related to the product). We look to maintain nearly 100% customer satisfaction and focus our quality reviews on areas where we fell short. As a business, we also look at metrics like mean time to close (MTTC) for tickets, but in a trade off we’ll encourage our support team to drive for the fully satisfied customer even if it blows up their other metrics. We understand the tradeoff and accept it willingly.
• Thank you notes - This behavior has fallen by the wayside because success and scale outpaced us, but in our earliest years, when we were adding dozens of new homes a day, at the end of each week we’d deliver a chunk of already addressed thank you notes to every employee (every employee) and ask them to spend a few minutes introducing themselves, sharing what they do for the company (engineer, QA, marketing, exec) and thanking the customer directly for joining us on our mission to turn every home into a smart home. I know more than a few customers expressed delight in receiving such a personalized touch, but the power of the program was more about getting every single employee to recognize, appreciate and value that without our customers, we had no business. That recognition then seeps into every other area of the organization. Oh.....and did I mention through the creative genius of folks like Angela Campbell our thank you notes were works of art!

• Everyone does tickets - Full disclosure….this is something we’ve never implemented fully and it’s something I regret. On occasion (especially under high load), we’ve encouraged large parts of our organization to try and step in, take tickets and help out, but we’ve never had a systematic ‘exchange program’ where it’s a consistent and regular part of everyone’s job. I think pairing this with the thank you note program would create the most powerful and self-reinforcing impact possible. Every employee would both appreciate customers personally/individually, and appreciate what customers go through in using the product broadly. I can’t think of a way to be more customer-centric.
• Employees are customers themselves - Employees get the product. We expect them to live in a smart home themselves, to use it daily, and make it part of their life outside the office. Everyone, at a minimum, has a door that can be made smarter with SmartThings, so there’s no excuse for not using the product. This extends to making as many employees as possible part of the beta releases and bug reporters. When you are a customer yourself, you can’t help but becoming more customer-centric. (Along these lines, I sometimes wonder if airline executives fly coach as regular humans enough). I recognize this works well for a consumer product like SmartThings and might not be extensible to, say, an enterprise infrastructure business. I don’t offer any platitudes on how to solve the problem, but I’d love comments from those who have.
• Hire great people - It’s likely fair to say none of the rest of this list matters outside of this one. We hire great folks in our service organization. We look for the type of person who is passionate about the smart home industry and wants to share that passion with others. They truly care. And we care about them. This isn’t a ding against outsourced call center operations…..I understand their role in large scale, transactional support organizations. But I can’t imagine we’d be in the list of companies above without having the group we have as dedicated and fully committed members of the SmartThings team.

So thanks Kyle Hayes, for the kind words. And thank you to the SmartThings support team for everything you do, every day.