There is a great interview
with Paul English,
co-founder of Kayak.com,
and the innovative way
he handles customer service.
Here is a snippet
(the entire article is well worth reading)
“The engineers and I handle customer support.
When I tell people that,
they look at me like I’m smoking crack.
They say,
“Why would you pay an engineer $150,000
to answer phones
when you could pay someone in Arizona
$8 an hour?”
If you make the engineers answer
e-mails and phone calls
from the customers,
the second or third time
they get the same question,
they’ll actually stop what they’re doing
and fix the code.
Then we don’t have those questions anymore.”
If your problem solvers
are in charge of customer service,
your customer service problems
will get solved.