Derek Sivers delivers. Rhyming out of the way, Founder of CD Baby, Derek delivers a unique talk for BoS on the Philosophy six great mindsets for customer service, and how it can reap dividends, as it did for him at his own company.
Transcript below
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CD Baby had lots of well funded competitors but after a few years they were all gone and we kind of dominated our niche of selling independent music. Okay, so CD Baby had 150,000 musicians, 2 million buying customers, $139 million in revenue and we paid $83 million directly to the musicians but I still didnât know why it was successful. I never did any marketing. It was just this project that I started and word of mouth just kind of made it explode so I honestly didnât know why people liked it. So whenever I would go out and talk with my musician clients, and Iâd go out to conferences and events, I would always ask people why they liked CD Baby or why they chose CD Baby to sell their music. Often it would mean that I would just quietly sit and listen as they were raving to their friends saying, âDude you donât know about CD Baby?
I gotta tell ya, these guys are awesome! â And guess what they said. Was it the pricing? Was it the features? Was it my classy amateurish design? No. The number one answer, by far, anytime someone raved about CD Baby, I couldnât believe how many times I heard this answer.
The number one thing was, they pick up the phone, and that was it.
That was the number one reason why people said that they chose CD Baby over Amazon and all these other companies to sell their music. Itâs because they would say either, I called you and you answered on the second ring, blew my mind or, I had a real problem, I called you guys up and you totally hooked me up, or you replied to my email with something personal within two minutes. So thatâs why I send all my business to you and thatâs why they would tell their other musician friends, âYou gotta use these guys. Theyâre awesome. You can reach them. They pick up the phone.â So that was it. I mean, who couldâve guessed that all these other things we do, the features, the pricing, the partnerships and marketing, everything else you do doesnât matter as much as somebody saying, these people pick up their phone. Thatâs why Iâm going with them. So I ended up structuring the business to match this priority. I had 85 employees and that was 50 people in the warehouse, 28 people doing full time customer service and then just 5 of us that did some other stuff. That was the whole company. So since then, many entrepreneurs and interviewers and such have asked for my customer service tips and tricks but I recently realized itâs not something that you can add on top of what youâre doing. It really comes more from a core philosophy.
It has to come from a mindset and Iâm no expert on the subject and Iâm too shy to tell you the things Iâm actually an expert on, but Iâve learned a few things from doing this for 16 years.
So here are the six key mindsets that I think guide great customer service.
Number one, most important is that you can afford to be generous.
I think this is the most important mindset that underlies everything. Before engaging in communication with any customers or clients is that your business is secure. The reason I say this is that, well even if itâs not, you have to feel that it is because you have to feel this sense of abundance that money is coming your way, youâre doing well. Youâre not in any danger. Youâre one of the lucky ones. Most people are not so fortunate. You can afford to be generous with your time, your policies, etcetera because I think that all good service comes from this mindset of generosity and abundance. So if you think of all the examples of great service youâve received in the past. So for example, if you got free refills of coffee, or a business that lets you use their toilets even though youâre not a paying customer, or a place that gives you extra milk and sugar if you need it, or a rep that spends a whole hour with you on the phone to answer all of your dumb naĂŻve questions about their product, all of these things are coming from a place of generosity, but on the flip side, if you contrast it with all of the bad customer experiences youâve had, most of them come from this place of scarcity, like not letting you use the toilets without making a purchase, charging an additional fifty cents for extra sauce, or sales people who wonât give you a minute of their time because you donât look like you have big money.
All of those – theyâre acting like theyâre scared theyâre going to go out of business if they give you that extra sauce. But I was recently reading that, what are they called, anthropologist that study people who are trapped in the cycle of poverty often say that the reason people get trapped in the cycle is that when youâre in a state of poverty, youâre forced into this survival mode of short term thinking. You canât engage in any long term strategic thinking because youâre just trying to survive. So I think the businesses that have this thinking, no we have to be really careful and defensive. We have to watch our bottom line. Donât give them free sauce! Charge them fifty cents! Itâs this kind of short term survival thinking that I think ends up keeping them in this loop, but if you really feel secure and abundant and you have plenty to share, than this feeling of generosity kind of flows down into all of your interactions with customers.
So share and be nice. Give refunds and take a little loss because you can afford it. Thatâs the mindset, but of course itâs also smart business because losing ten cents on extra sauce can mean winning the loyalty of a customer who will spend a thousand dollars with your over the next ten years and tell 20 friends that you guys are amazing.
Philosophy number two, is that the customer is more important than the company.
What this means is, well, for example, let me back up.
Think of a time where you had to make a big decision in your life, like one of those big fork-in-the-road, oh my god I donât know what to do.
For example, if you were ever offered two jobs, one that was going to pay you a lot of money but have no freedom and another one that was going to pay you less money but give you a lot more freedom. You go back and forth. You go, god I donât know what to do. The pros and the cons. You make a list of all these things and eventually you made a decision, but I like to say that when you finally made a decision, itâs because you finally decided on which value was most important to you.
So in that little example, you decided either the money is more important to me, or the freedom is more important to me but it really comes down to having to decide which value is most important and most of us never make that decision until weâre forced to. Until weâre given one of these forks in the road, we say, god I donât know what to do. But Iâd like to suggest that if you want to provide great customer service, you make this decision upfront. That you just decide upfront that weâre going to prioritize that whateverâs best for the customer over the bottom line of the company and then you make sure that everybody in the company knows this. So you canât micro manage every detail of whatâs going to happen in every customer interaction, so instead you make sure that everybody in the company knows that whenever they have to make a decision about what is the right thing to do, they always do whateverâs best for the customer. Whatever would make the customer the happiest and donât worry about the company. Again, like number one, the companyâs fine. Donât worry about it. Focus on the customer.
Philosophy number three, Customer Service is a profit center.
So is, Kathy Siera still here? No? Oh, hi Kathy! Youâre the reason Iâm here. Umm, well, both you and Mark. I was already a big fan of the conference and Mark had asked me to come. I thought may- yeah, I think so. Iâd like to. And then I went through the page and said, oh shit, Kathyâs gonna be there. Iâm there. [laughter]
So, Iâm a big fan of Kathy and her work and her writing and her blogs and so this morning she gave this amazing talk and she talked about how so many companies optimize down to every last pixel this stuff that gets you to buy and then once you click the buy now button, once youâre inside the product, you donât get so much attention anymore. Youâre not so AB optimized. And so for years youâve been kind of calling on companies and people to continue to improve the experience inside and after the purchase but she didnât explicitly say why companies donât do this, but I think itâs pretty obvious, is that, everybody thinks that- everybody knows that the stuff that you do until that sale is clearly profitable. Itâs kind of business 101, business for dummies you can say.
Get them to make the sale, thatâs where the profit comes from. But I think it takes more wisdom, experience and long term thinking to understand that keeping your existing customers thrilled is even more profitable than trying to get them in, in the first place. So customer service is not an expense that needs to be lessened, itâs a core profit center, like sales. Itâs something you put your best people on, not your cheapest. Youâve heard the old business truism, that itâs something like five times harder to get a new client than it is to get repeat business from an existing client. So I think this is where you put it into practice.
If you hire the sweetest most charming people and make sure they have all the time in the world to spend with your clients, making sure that the clients feel heard so that theyâre so happy with your service that theyâll tell everyone they know. If you hire enough people so that they actually have time to pick up the phone instead of routing people into the automated phone system, and then when those people get so busy that they have barely enough time to keep up with all of the incoming emails or phone calls or whatever it is, you need to hire somebody before it gets to that point because what you donât want to get is somebody whoâs barely keeping up by firing off those quick little replies. Sometimes thatâs almost as bad as doing nothing at all. If theyâre too busy, theyâre feeling that frustration and sending out succinct little replies.
Get somebody before that happens so they have time to spend with each customer.
Philosophy number four, every interaction is your moment to shine.
I think probably only one percent of your customers or clients will ever bother to make a customer service interaction, so when they do I think this is really your time to shine. That five minutes spent with this person is going to shape their impression of your company more than your name, your price, your design, your website, your features all combined. You got those five minutes on the phone where youâre going to completely shape their decision of you. So I think this is your shining moment to be the best you can be and blow them away with how cool it was to contact you. If you teach your customer service to be efficient, I think it sends this message that, I donât really want to talk to you, letâs get this over with quick. You know that if you call a friend and theyâre being like, âyeah, yeah, uh huh, alright, whatever, bye.â Itâs kind of like, I donât want to talk to you right now.
So I think too many companies do this customer service thing where they teach their reps to be as quick as possible, as efficient as possible, but think about what message thatâs sending out. So since thatâs what everyone else does, I recommend doing the opposite. Take a few inefficient moments to get to know everyone who contacts you. For example, at CD Baby when somebody would call up and say, âIâm thinking about selling my music with you. Can I talk with somebody about that?â We say, âsure, no problem, whatâs your name?â Theyâd say, Mark. Weâd say, you have a website? Theyâd say, yeah and tell us their website. Weâd say, hold on a second, pull up the website and say cool, is that you there on the front page? They say, yeah, yeah thatâs me. I say cool, hold on. Let me listen to your music for a second. No way, cool and you listen to like thirty seconds of their music, and I can tell you from being an independent self promoting musician for 15 years. When somebody actually listens to your music, even for one minute and gives you their attention, itâs like, you remember it for the rest of your life. Itâs so touching, like, he listened to my music. Like the guy at the company. The guy that picked up the phone listened to my music. You got a bond for life and it took us all of fucking two minutes to add that to the call, you know what I mean. So we always would train all of the reps at CD Baby like, make this a policy and not in some systematic, monochrome, monochrome? You know what I mean, monotone scripted way but to just engage in conversation for a few minutes.
Most of the people that worked for me were musicians themselves so that helped.
But this isnât just some sales technique. This is just good human behavior and it makes life better and it makes work more fun when youâve got a context for the people that youâre working with all day, and itâs the right thing to do and it pays off.
So one last idea is that when customers would call to buy music, we also have this toll free number that customers could use to call up if they wanted to buy a CD mail order and just felt like calling instead of using the website. We had a toll free number that could do that and it was great whenever they would call because we would ask them. Weâd take the order and while weâre putting the order together we would say, so where did you hear of this artist? And theyâd say, âOh, well we were down in Florida and we saw them playing. Iâd say oh cool, do you often go out to listen to music at clubs? Yeah, cool. Or they would tell me that they heard it on WEXP radio and theyâd tell me what show and weâre learning all this stuff about where these customers are hearing of new music or, you know. Itâs just taking that few minutes to not make your interactions efficient but making them decidedly inefficient leads to better interactions.
So lastly, imagine what you would do if Paul McCartney called. You would drop everything, gush some praise. âOh my god! Paul McCartney!â And youâd be so thrilled that he was contacting you that you would give him all the time in the world for whatever he wants. So I think thatâs how we should treat everyone that contacts us. And why not? You know. You donât have time? Well, make time âcause thatâs how everyone deserves to be treated.
Last thing, you know that thereâs this research that says that we donât smile because weâre happy, we actually smile first and the physical act of smiling is what makes you feel happy. So I think that the act of acting your best and kind of being on your best behavior and being super nice and interested in other people and friendly.
Even if you werenât really in the mood to do it, actually kind of leads you to be your best.
Okay, what number am I on, number five. Lose every fight.
I love this. I think that customer service usually starts when someone has a problem and theyâre usually upset but kind of like you need to feel secure for your business to be generous, I think you need to feel secure to decide to lose every fight. What this means is, whenever someoneâs upset, just let them know that they are so right and you are so wrong. You are so sorry. They win, you lose and you are prepared to do whatever it takes to make them happy again. Iâm saying this but letâs admit that itâs hard to turn off that human nature that when somebodyâs attacking you, you kind of bristle and you want to attack back. To feel that things are directed to you personally. Especially if youâve created the site or the service that somebody is criticizing. You canât help to kind of want to show them that no theyâre wrong and youâre right damnit! But almost every week, still I have to kind of catch myself starting to write one of those responses, but after years of getting burned for doing that, I finally kind of catch myself and replace it with something angelic instead. You know that scene in the movies, or TV where someone is saying something that they think is secret or saying something kind of nasty or insulting about somebody and they realize that their microphone is on so they immediately kind of straighten up and correct themselves and say the publicly acceptable thing instead. Well, your microphone is on and thereâs no private communication in customer service. That anything you say is very likely to be put on someoneâs blog or Facebook or retweeted and immediately seen by everyone.
So make sure you donât indulge yourself in that need to lash out âcause that stuff gets reposted everywhere. So you have to be the best version of yourself. You must let them win every fight. You must humbly bow to your superior and make them happy. And kind of like how I said about how smiling makes you happy. I think that the act of doing this everyday I think itâs actually very peaceful. I kind of think of it like daily empathy practice. And over the years my company had a few huge evangelists. People that would just go tell everyone that you have to sell your music at CD Baby. You have to buy all your music at CD Baby. These guys are awesome. Theyâre very loud evangelists. I never really understood why and a few times, I would go back into that personâs communication history with us and look at the first email they ever sent, or the first time they called and whatâs funny is, I very often found out that those very loud evangelists usually contacted us when they were very loudly upset about something.
They would contact us being so mad about a problem, you know, screw you guys. You screwed up my order. And theyâd be so upset and then weâd somehow win them over and calm them. Replace their, whatever it took and they would turn into our loudest evangelist. So I think the lesson learned is that loud people are loud people whether theyâre complaining or praising. So when you get some loud complaint try to think of it as an opportunity to do whatever it takes to make them so happy that they become one of those loud evangelists.
So lastly, you can rebelliously right the wrongs of the world.
You know thereâs this little passive aggressive move we all do. That when we donât like how someone is behaving, we instinctively kind of take the high road to show them how to behave, right. You know this thing that you do, like if somebodyâs speaking too loud in a quiet place you speak to them extra soft. Show them that itâs not okay. And if someone is being a complete slob you may straighten up your area first before telling them what a slob they are. You just kind of take the high road and show them how it should be done, right. So I think this is kind of a little defiant act that says no, youâre doing it wrong. Here, watch me. Iâll show you how itâs done.
So I think that your business is like your little part of the world where you can right all of the wrongs of the world and show them how itâs done.
To do this you need to be rebellious. Donât follow norms. When youâre starting a company or wondering what to do next or youâre at any kind of crossroads, donât just do what the other companies are doing. Instead think of the worse experiences youâve ever had and do the opposite from that. Youâll end up doing something different and also you get to show them how wrong they were. Itâs very cathartic. Thank you. [applause] Questions? Iâll do questions, sure!
Mark: Questions? Letâs start here. Iâll start out with the first one. You got very, very non-data approach to this stuff. I love, I mean I just love that this feels like the right thing to do. Itâs very- itâs not very valley and VV. Everyoneâs sort of focusing on data and how can I get more money. So really, one of the reasons I wanted you to come back is that you are very kind of human in your approach. Have you got any data that can back up those sorts of assertions? This feels like the right thing to do. Have you got any kind of numbers that the data people can look at and go, yeah.
Sivers: Not really, you know. Thatâs funny, I had to laugh because when I was writing this talk, I had this funny intro that said, well you know the thing that impressed me about the Business of Software Conference is how itâs so specific and everybodyâs got all this data and these numbers and all this AB testing. So I actually put together- I had this intro with these numbers of saying, you know, I spoke to this many clients at this many conferences and this many people said this and then I realized it was really long winded and boring and I cut the whole intro. [laughter] But no, honestly, I really donât. A lot of this stuff was very unmeasured. Iâm one of those people that- I ended up just turning off my web server logs too because I realized that years had gone by and Iâve never really looked at them, so I admire the people that measure the hell out of things and I aspire to do that but I have not yet, so.
Question:  Iâm hearing what youâre saying. I think itâs great if youâve got a lot of customers very low value or potentially low value sales. I come from a business where weâve got a few very high value sales. Weâre talking about a few multimillion dollar sales. How applicable is what youâve talking to that sort of industry, do you think? Sivers: The real answer is, I hope to never find out. [laughter] Sorry. I know thereâs this thing where when Iâm on stage Iâm supposed to act smart or something but I have no idea and it was actually one of my⊠Question: Thanks for answering. Sivers: Yeah, sorry. But it was one of my founding ideas is I saw a lot of businesses starting at the same time I did. I started CD Baby way back in end of 1997 beginning of 1998.
The first dot com boom and itâs still going. I sold the company a few years ago. But around that time I saw a lot of my friends in New York City starting companies that were geared towards a few big clients and it always just seemed like hell to me because they were so dependent on a few key people. So Iâve always tried to make a point of making businesses with tons of small clients giving me, I mean, most people paid us $35 or so and so if somebody had a giant complaint Iâd say so, hereâs your $35 bucks. Iâm sorry. Question: So you, you can basically, you can afford to give something away. Whereas you canât have- we canât have someone in our support team giving away half a million dollars worth of value. Sivers: Okay, well that said, thereâs- have you seen this book called, The Art of Profitability? Okay, you might wanna jot that down because actually, the very first chapter has something called the customer solution profit. The authorâs name is Adrian Slyvoski. Art of Profitability. Brilliant little book. Told in a funny way. He actually creates two fictional characters having a conversation to tell that book. I think he wrote a couple of dry academic books before that and maybe didnât get enough response so he made this- Art of Profitability is about these two people having a conversation, kind of a teacher and student style, but he talks about this one thing called the customer solution profit where he found some software companies that had done exceptionally well, better than the competitors and the way that they had done it is by, I feel like, I wish I could draw something. They would have a few big clients, like youâre talking about, they would go into the company and lose a lot of money at first by embedding people inside the company to deeply customize what they were doing for that customer.
Have a couple of people working inside the company for free saying we just keep them there. Theyâre there for whatever you want 24/7 and by doing this, they deeply customize their software for that client. Took a loss in the first year or two but then that customer was so deeply intertwined with their software that they remained at a premium for years to follow. Thatâs one little idea that might help that Iâve heard of.
Question: Thank you. Hi Derek, my name is Clark. I mean this nicely, were you born this way or did you figure it out? Just watching you here, it sounds like your company reflects your personality. So tell us about your mother. [laughter]
Sivers: Honestly, I think a lot of it is that rebellion thing that I was talking about near the end. I set up CD Baby as a rebellion against the traditional music distribution models because I was a self promoting musician myself and I got shit on over and over and over again by these traditional distributors that would say, it works like this, how many units can you sell, well if you canât sell that many in three months then youâre out and never talk to us again. Or, hey, you sold a lot of units, maybe weâll pay you in a couple years. Give us some more. Or, you know, who the hell are you. Youâre nobody famous. Donât contact us again. Or, you know, submitting my music to be performed at festivals or whatever and always kind of getting hung up on because we didnât have a big following. Like over and over and over again. It was really depressing and so when I set up my own thing. I set up this mission. I did it just as a hobby at first. I set up this little website to help a few of my friends and it really came from, kind of like the hackers space, it kind of came from this community spirit.
You know Iâve got this credit card merchant account. All my friends want one so instead of every one of my friendâs friends having to go get one, because back in 1997 it was like a thousand dollars in set up fees and a lot of work. I did all that work. I built the whole ecommerce website and all that stuff so I just shared it with my friends. So the whole DNA of the business was coming from a nice place. You know what I mean. But then even when I realized that I had accidentally started a business that it wasnât just a hobby for my friends, I decided to get somewhat serious about it.
I gave myself four missions.
God I havenât talked about this in a long time.
- I said, okay, if Iâm gonna do this thing Iâm gonna make it like a little dream come true otherwise itâs not worth doing. So itâs like number one, the musicians will get paid every week âcause in traditional distribution you get paid once a year or something like that. I was like no, CD Baby, every musician gets paid every week, number one.
- Number two, theyâll never get kicked out for not selling enough. You could sell one CD every ten years and Iâll keep you here forever, I donât care.
- Number three, no paid placement. The people, the guys that can afford it will never bump out the guys that canât afford it. Thatâs never fair. And,
- I forget what number four was. But it was like four things like that that I said, if Iâm gonna do this thing, itâs gotta be kind of a dream come true like this, but yeah it was definitely done out of this spirit of rebellion so kind of like, fuck you big evil companies. Iâll show you how this shit can be done. And thrive and be done right and it, if it doesnât than Iâd rather it go away.
So um yeah I guess Iâm probably a nice guy generally, but a lot of this was just very pragmatic and especially when you get feedback. When musicians and customers would keep telling me that the reason that they like CD Baby is because weâre so cool, weâre so easy to reach, because we pay every week. You know, it just, it feeds back and so it leads you to want to do more of whatâs working.
sp3: Hi, Max from MakePositive, now I know that when you sold your company you gave all the money away to charity. The founder of my company has just given away all his shares. Everyone thinks when I say that is heâs gone completely mad is the first reaction. I mean, what do you think of that?
Sivers: Why did he do it? You know?
sp3: He doesnât believe in money. He thinks money is the wrong motivation for the world and wanted to make a statement.
Sivers: Everyoneâs got their own reasons. Yeah, I donât know. Thereâs a very typical way that people are supposed to do things and I think itâs kind of funny that, you know I come from this background in music and you can imagine if you see somebody whoâs, imagine a business man in a suit saying, okay right, I wanna do music now. Theyâre taking piano lessons and they sit down at the piano and theyâre doing things very stiff and proper. And a good musician will say, câmon man, loosen up. Maybe it takes a few years to kind of get comfortable so you can just play. You donât need to worry so much about the correct fingerings and the lessons you learn, just play. And I often feel that way about business. I feel that people get so fucking conservative and they kind of look at others and they want so badly to succeed that they try to imitate other models and they think I should act like this or we need to do what these guys are doing but I see it a lot more as just creative expression.
So I donât, it doesnât really feel like thereâs a right and a wrong way and I think more people should express their individuality when it comes to choices like that. Like, Iâm gonna give away all my shares or whatever it may be. I think thatâs not done enough, so I think itâs kind of healthy when some people do that publicly. I was never going to, when I did it, it was just my little secret. I was never going to tell anybody that I had done it and then some guy with some little podcast was interviewing me and we were 45 minutes into the podcast and, sorry to those who have a podcast but, whoever listens 45 minutes into a podcast. So when he asked me this question of like, how much did you sell CD Baby for, I thought, nobodyâs gonna listen this far into this so I told my answer and then he said, whatâd you do with the money, and I said I gave it away, and what. He ended up making it the headline of his interview. âDerek Sivers sells CD Baby for $22 million and gives it all away. I was like aww fuck! So I was outed but then I realized, writing it up, I ended up writing a blog posting about it âcause I said well as long as Iâm outed I might as well share this because maybe somebody a few years from now will at least know that thatâs something they could do. You know. No, I bumped into him in a bathroom once though. He looks just like my dad. [laughter]
sp4: Hello, Chris Massey from Redgate. I can see how this works as a seed. Itâs like grow a business from this philosophy but given that youâre talking about institutionalize emotional security, have youâve ever seen a business that isnât doing this retrofit and kind of adopt it? âCause youâre trying to push something that it feels like, itâs almost a state of mind rather than a practice.
Sivers: It would have to be one of those kind of business reinvention stories. Youâre right. Itâs really deeply ingrained. I donât study a lot of other businesses.
sp4: It feels like you could adopt the practices, and try and kind of, like smiling right. If you do these a lot eventually the thought, the mindset behind it will kind of become ingrained maybe. I donât know, I havenât seen that kind of dramatic shift anywhere from a company anywhere that was doing this to a company that is. I donât know if you had any experiences with that.
Sivers: I donât have any examples. Companies are just people right. Itâs hard to remember that sometimes. They seem like big machines but really its people inside. I think at least from my experience, most people are very welcomed to this. Like even inside a company. If you tell people like, look, no matter what happens just do whateverâs best for the company, I mean for the customer. Yeah, fuck them! [laughter] Just do whateverâs best for the customer. Donât worry about us, refund their money. Donât worry about it. Like refund double their money if theyâre upset. I donât care. I think individuals are very happy to hear policies like that. It makes them happier to do their job and itâs very clear. It gives them a lot of clarity. Instead of some foggy ambiguous, well we believe in quality, service and dependability which means nothing, or instead of giving a big stack of, hereâs 105 stacks of possible scenarios, make sure you match up your scenario with one of these. Giving a simple rule like that, I think itâs really easy to communicate inside a bigger organization.
You know what I mean. Itâs like an easy rule of thumb. It also really helps to have stories. Everybody knows it. Itâs kind of a clichĂ© but stories travel better right. Thereâs a reason that we still know Aesopâs Fables and not Aesopâs bullet points. Because they were turned into these little stories of foxes and hares and whatnot and those things can travel for two thousand years whereas little bullet points canât. So I think if you have a couple stories that you can use inside a company to make an example. I think my customer service guys ended up getting these little urban legends themselves. There was one, people who ordered through the site were allowed, there was a little box at the end of the order where after you put your CD into your shopping cart and you are about to pay it says, any special request. And it would say, yes, anything and it would just give them a little text area box. And most people would leave it blank or say cool thanks but every now and then people would do a funny little request in there. Like, Iâm in the mood for some cinnamon gum, please include. And so I always told the guys in the warehouse if you get any of these special request get some money from the little jar and head out to the store and do whatever they ask. And it would become this kind of fun challenge when they would get it right. So theyâd go include some cinnamon gum. And of course the customers, âholy shit!â[laughter] And of course theyâd blog about it and tell everybody. And if you guys want to see a fun story, I think if you go to sivers.org/squid I think I made a little short URL that one time, somebody ordered a CD where the cover of the CD was somebodyâs head with a squid on top of it and so the person placing the order said I would also like some squid with my order please. Thank you. Believe it or not somebody had recently sent us some CDs from Korea and they had enclosed a shrink wrapped dried squid and the guys at the warehouse had kind of hung it up on the memorabilia board along with funny pictures of Gary Coleman or whatever and they said, âdude, somebody just asked for squid! Letâs do it!â And they included the squid in the order and so the guy who got it went on to Youtube and told this story into the camera of how he placed this order at CD Baby and it has a few hundred thousand views of him telling the story about CD Baby including the squid. Anyway, the point is, if you have a few stories like this that people can tell as little urban legends inside the company, it communicates it better than saying, dit dit dit. You know. That said, a simple rule. Always do whatâs best for the customer. As clichĂ© as that sounds, like put it into practice. I think it can transform internally pretty easily. Thanks for being welcoming by the way. Iâve never given this talk before and I literally was kind of writing it some more this morning and put together the PowerPoint presentation over lunch so thanks for being welcoming and cool today.
sp5: Hello, my name is Anna I work for tech support. So my question is, I know youâre saying itâs really good to be generous to the customer but what if theyâre being unreasonable or trying to get things out of you? How do you react to that?
Sivers: Let them. Itâs what I meant about let them win the fight. Youâd be surprised that I think, again, you gotta come from that place of knowing that youâre not gonna go out of business because of one crazy customer and taking a loss it can often be the smartest thing youâve done âcause worse case scenario, they just go away and you never hear from them again and you took a little loss and they grumble to themselves and they live in their shack with a shotgun and nobody comes near. [laughter]
But usually, I found many times that people that are really, really upset, and we took a loss on refunding all their money even though weâve done all the work, including, wait am I, Iâm being filmed. Well I wonât tell you that the girl from Ipanema pissed me off and we got into a fight and I sent her all her money back, but the⊠even if youâve done all of the work and youâre gonna take a loss and you refund their money in full and all that stuff, youâll find often, at least I did, that those people will often come back to you later apologizing. Maybe they were just in a really bad time in their lives and then theyâll always have a good story to tell everybody else. I think the unstated assumption in all of this is that people are very, very connected now and word gets around so fast that if anybody feels scammed by you theyâre so likely to go start one of those, this company sucks websites or go write many blog posts about what a scam you are. Every person needs to really go away feeling that they won. Do you know what I mean? Let them win the fight every time even if you take a little loss. Itâs okay. Question: Thank you. Question: Just a couple years ago. This is a plug for your book. Couple years ago, I got your book on kindle, read it and really loved it. So short question is, sequel, another book, something else coming?
Sivers: Umm, yeah. [laughter] Question: Thanks. [applause]
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