The SpareFoot ACE (Amazing Customer Experience) Team prides itself on impeccable service all the time. At last month’s Stevie Awards, SpareFoot earned a bronze medal for Sales & Customer Service.
SpareFoot operates the country’s largest online marketplace for self-storage and has the largest inventory of storage units in the U.S., with a network of more than 7,000 facilities.
Josh Lipton, leader of SpareFoot’s ACE Team, explained to Loyalty360 why it’s called the Amazing Customer Experience Team.
“We use the word ‘amazing’ to describe the type of experience we aspire to deliver each and every time we touch a SpareFoot customer,” Lipton said. “There’s a big difference between a “meh” interaction and a truly amazing one. To deliver an amazing experience, you need to be an exceptional type of person, dedicated to the needs of others above anything else—and the ACE Team certainly is made up of people who meet those criteria.”
Winning the bronze at the Stevie Awards validates SpareFoot’s approach to customer service, Lipton said.
“While this validation means a tremendous amount to SpareFoot, it’s even more important to our key partners, such as Penske Truck Rental, and the more than 7,000 self-storage facilities across the country that trust us to speak with their customers on a daily basis,” he said.
Lipton said that his company lives by the words of Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: “Your culture is your brand, your brand is your culture.”
For the ACE Team, Lipton highlighted the three keys to exceptional customer service:
Adaptability—Team members should be flexible both with each other and customers. Always.
Authentic—Be real, connect, and understand that for each person we talk with, solving their immediate need for self-storage is significant for them and should be to us.
“Other-ish”—We should be focused on the needs of others, more so than ourselves. Our needs are met by meeting others’ needs.
Lipton said the most obvious logistical challenge is providing sufficient coverage for inbound volume across multiple time zones.
“We’ve developed schedules that allow all team members to allocate 80% of their working time to their primary responsibility of handling inbound calls, outbound calls or online interactions, while allowing 20% of their time for more self-directed activities such as training, peer evaluation, customer love, or one of many other areas of responsibility,” he said.
Brand differentiation, in and of itself, often can be an expensive and an elusive chase for many organizations, Lipton said.
“By focusing on our culture as brand, we realize so many more benefits than if we simply worked to ‘check the box’ of any one set of things that would help us build the brand,” Lipton said. “The long-term value of customer experience as the brand in the marketplace is enormous, as that sort of differentiator cannot simply be ‘solved’ with money or a new mission, but instead requires long-term development and nurturing.”
SpareFoot has nearly 120 employees at its headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Lipton said Sparefoot benchmarks against that more “elusive standard” of an amazing experience.
“What we might have considered amazing a year ago is now very normal, which pushes us to get better and better each day,” he explained. “In one sense, we benchmark relentlessly against ourselves, always expecting more. Scaling for success is the name of the game now, which in some situations may require us to replace approaches that worked at one stage with new thinking that is required for the next stage. It’s an awesome challenge, but with a team like this, I can assure you that we all sleep well at night.”
From a performance standpoint, Lipton said SpareFoot measures across three key metrics: conversion rate, schedule adherence and customer satisfaction scores.
“All of these metrics and more are shared across the entire team in keeping with two additional core SpareFoot values: transparency and being data-driven,” he said. “As opposed to a more typical structure in a traditional call center, where information is known only to a few key members, the entire ACE team is aware of details that otherwise would be hidden or unavailable altogether. With all that said, we measure our systems the same way: Are they enabling the experience that we endeavor to deliver or are they not? Building the best possible infrastructure for a truly excellent customer experience is more about what tools and systems we simplify and far less about what additional layers we add.”
Lipton would be very interested in seeing what opportunities and challenges other organizations have found as they’ve experienced rapid growth in terms of team size.
“What advice would they give us at SpareFoot as we plan for scenarios where ACE handles double the volume each and every year for the foreseeable future?” he said.