The Container Store organizes itself around customer service A year ago, an employee of The Container Store nominated the company to Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” survey by claiming, “I love this company because `Customer Service is #1′!!…All customers can reach us by phone at any time.” Anyone who has called your average present-day customer service department can attest that that’s a bonus: Sometimes its nice not to be directed to a Web site help section.
The Container Store placed first in that esteemed survey, coming from nowhere to be named Fortune’s best employer of 2000. And the good news for customers is that the enthusiastic employee quoted above was right: This upscale retail chain specializing in home-organization products treats its customers as well as it does its employees. “We make our e-mail and phone number prominent on our Web site in case the customer needs to make a more detailed decision,” says John Thrailkill, the firm’s e-business marketing director. “We let them decide how much information to get from what source.” Seconds Amy Carovillano, vice president of distribution: “We don’t want them to feel they’re out on their own.”
To support this policy, The Container Store, which sells through 22 stores, five catalogs and a Web site (www.containerstore.com), staffs a 60-person customer solutions department at its headquarters in Dallas. As a privately owned, upscale retailer, The Container Store can afford to position its call center near the front lines of customer service. Its average customer is a college-educated female from a $75,000 household. Thrailkill says the customer solutions department has some significant expenses, but also handles calls from customers of each of the chain’s stores nationwide.
“We are privately held,” he adds. “So we can look at those things in a more forgiving, long-term way than companies that have to answer to stockholders.”
So when The Container Store began promoting products on its Web site in August, the company made no drastic changes to its customer service department or policies. There was no trying to defer least-profitable customers to an online frequently asked questions (FAQ) section, no hiding its toll-free 888-CONTAIN number or channeling customers through e-mail. Sure, the company posted FAQs on the site, but phone reps were still available to answer seemingly generic inquiries, up to 500 of them a day. Questions cover what a product is made of, what colors it comes in and, after it’s purchased, how to assemble it.
In addition, the department’s 200 customer e-mails a day are not brushed off with automated responses. A rep looks at every response, many of them auto-suggested by a Kana inbound e-mail management application, before they’re sent back to the customer. “Because of the nature of questions we get, we’re still not comfortable using that artificial intelligence,” says Carovillano, adding the company is exploring that feature for the future.
The larger reason the company makes its customer solutions reps so accessible is the nature of its business: The reps are not filling orders, they’re solving problems and suggesting solutions. They are less order-takers than salespeople. A typical customer calls for a solution to a space problem, such as with a pantry or closet. Reps are trained – three months in a store, 235 hours total – to find solutions for customer problems. And their solutions rang up $12 million in annual sales in 2000, 5% of the store’s annual revenues of $237 million.
Thrailkill says the reps are equally comfortable communicating by phone or online. At least half of them are also capable of designing and selling The Container Store’s highest-margin product, its elfa organization solution. Elfa represents 20% of all company revenues, a percentage growing toward 25%. Reps can walk customers step-by-step through the process of designing an elfa system, either on the phone or online. Using the Web site, a customer inputs some preliminary design information, which the rep turns into a design over a couple of days, posting a draft of the solution on a special Web page for the customer to see. Interacting with an online bulletin board system, the customer requests changes to the design on the Web page, and the rep makes further changes until the customer is ready to purchase. Carovillano quips that her reps are “fully closet-trained.”
This is gratifying work, one of the reasons the reps have an average four years’ experience with the company. Fortune magazine reported The Container Store loses only 28% of its full-time salespeople a year, compared with an industry average of 73.6%. Company executives view this culture of employee satisfaction as its primary reason for success. “Being able to offer this solutions-based approach-we need to keep that as our core competency,” Carovillano says. “Through hiring, training, through our ability to keep our employees happy.”
