A Great Case Study in Customer Service

Late October is always a busy time for Lawline, especially the Customer Service team.  Calls and inquiries are coming in and non-stop, but this late October was unlike any other.

PayPal API systems were down for over an hour on October 29th, and this proved to be a challenge for us (no one could order anything from our site because it is powered by PayPal!!).  In the end, Lawline persevered and was able to right the ship, and continue without a hiccup.  Lawline President, David Schnurman, sent out this email to the team at the end of the crazy day.

Date: 10/26/2010
Time: 8:45PM
Subject: A Great Case Study in Customer Service

Hey Guys,

To those of you who do not know for almost two hours today the PayPal systems were down worldwide and we were not able to take any orders online. This happened on one of the busiest days of the year during the busiest time of the day.  Looking back how we handled the situation was really special and something I do not think most companies could have pulled off so seamlessly.  Within minutes we had a message on the checkout page for customers to call us so we could take their order over the phone.  When someone called, instead of having to go through 5 minutes of recordings or wait time to complete their order, they got through to someone on the first ring.  Even though we could not charge them at that time, we gave them access to what they wanted to order right away, and took down their information to process later.

In addition to our stellar Customer Service/Retention team Michael, Jeff, and Frank Jr. chipped in to answer any call overflow because volume was very high. Right away we created a Skype chat room with people from both offices so we could easily communicate and get a handle on the call flow and status updates from PayPal. Lastly, we created a google doc so we could easily share any information of customer orders that we could not put through for one reason or another.

What were the results? During this time we took 25 orders over the phone. We turned this into an opportunity and to talk to our customers and thanked them for choosing Lawline.com for their CLE needs. Not one call went to voicemail. Not one customer was upset.  Things break all the time and customers understand that...it is how you handle those situations what makes you stand apart as a truly stellar company.

So I just wanted to thank everyone for amazing team work. See you guys tomorrow!