The monthly pulse of customer service in the U.S., showcasing the top performers, now includes 100 companies.

The newcomers are already impacting the rankings with great customer service. LLBean.com has led the email category for six months, but JCrew.com rivaled the retailer in nearly every metric in April. It was a single email reply that escaped LLBean.com for three days that caused their drop in the rankings.

Meanwhile, Nordstrom.com continued its dominance in phone support in the Department Stores category. The retailer has topped this list for six consecutive months, offering the fastest time to a live agent and best product and policy knowledge in April.

With speedy shipping becoming a more competitive component of the ecommerce experience, REI.com created some happy campers in April with the top shipping performance in the Sporting Goods vertical. The retailer not only had the fastest average delivery speed, but scored high marks for package fit.

A noticeable trend in April was several retailers missing high marks because they neglected to include a proper return slip. Stores like Bloomingdales.com, Lowes.com and Motorcycle-Superstore.com were able to stand apart from competitors with detailed packing slips that made the returns process easy.

Three retailers topped three categories: Lowes.com in Hardware/Home Improvement, Staples.com in Office Supplies, and SurLaTable.com in Home Furnishings.

STELLA Monthly Benchmarks includes companies covered by STELLAService with at least $100 million in revenue (according to the Internet Retailer Top 500 guide), as well as the five largest retailers in each of the 11 most popular customer categories.

The companies are measured across four service areas: phone, email, shipping and returns. STELLA Monthly Benchmarks are designed to provide consumers with guidance for smarter shopping and retailers an independent, reliable benchmark for measuring and improving their customer service.

A full list of companies included is available here.

Companies that topped their vertical in April:

Phone

AutoAnything.com
BarnesandNoble.com
Build.com
Net-A-Porter.com
Nordstrom.com
Overstock.com
Sephora.com
Shop.Lululemon.com
SierraTradingPost.com
SurLaTable.com
Vistaprint.com

Email

Dermstore.com
HSN.com
JCrew.com
Lowes.com
Nordstrom.com
OreillyAuto.com
REI.com
Shopping.HP.com
Staples.com
Store.Nike.com
SurLaTable.com

Shipping

Cooking.com
Dermstore.com
Lowes.com
Macys.com
Motorcycle-Superstore.com
REI.com
Sears.com
Shopbop.com
Staples.com
Store.Apple.com
Store.Nike.com

Returns

AutoAnything.com
BarnesandNoble.com
Bloomingdales.com
Fanatics.com
Lowes.com
Shop.Avon.com
SportmansGuide.com
Staples.com
SurLaTable.com
ToryBurch.com
Walmart.com

See how each vertical stacks up in STELLA Monthly Benchmarks here.

Admittedly I was a bit surprised to see the author of The Customer Rules offer up his personal contact info to his readers in the middle of the book.

If you ever need to contact me, just go to my website, www.LeeCockerell.com. There you will find my address, my e-mail, and my cell phone number. When you call me, I will answer the phone myself.

Was the author just doing this to illustrate a point, specifically Rule No. 21: Make Yourself Available? I decided to reach out with an interview request. Sure enough, Cockerell personally responded to my note just a few hours later, agreeing to a phone interview and sending along some additional details about his second book.

Cockerell makes the point early on in The Customer Rules that in any given company customer service is in the job description of every employee (Rule No. 1: Customer Service is Not a Department). He’s taken lessons from throughout his life — from his three grandchildren, from his wife’s 64-day stint at the Orlando Regional Medical Center, from his auto mechanic, Manny, from his time peeling potatoes as an army cook and from his 41 years serving at Disney, Marriott and Hilton — and rolled them into an easy to read manual for every industry and organization regardless of size, industry or profitability.

My takeaway? Treat everyone with whom you interact — vendors, creditors, suppliers, customers, other employees — with consistency, integrity, sincerity and creativity. Treat them like you would treat your loved ones. It’ll pay dividends.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length.

In your second book, The Customer Rules, you offer up 39 rules for delivering sensational service. What’s your essential advice to the managers and executives looking to improve their organizations from a service perspective?

Most managers are not paying enough attention to the three most important areas related to improving the experience of your customers:

1) On Hiring: Get tougher about the people you hire. Work harder and get systems in place to know which strengths they’re bringing. Hire people who have a passion for being in front of customers every day (Rule No. 9: Hire the Best Cast). A lot of people should never be in front of a customer. They’re not wired that way. They can’t handle the pressure and can’t stay high energy. Most companies don’t take enough time to hire the right people. They say in America that we hire to fast and fire too slow, and you end up with people who shouldn’t be there.

At Disney we are extremely careful about how we hire. We use a lot of profiling and have a lot of systems in place to make sure we’re hiring the right people. You go to Disney World and the chances of you running into a rude cast member or somebody not taking care of you is almost zero.

2) On Training and Testing: Before you turn people loose on the customers, make sure you test them (Rule No. 39: Become an Expert at Creating Experts). Training happens at a lot of organizations but testing does not. Don’t practice on your customers. Don’t turn them loose too quick. That’s how we do it at Disney.

3) On Culture: At Disney we focused on creating a culture where our 65,000 cast members wanted to come to work not because they had to for the paycheck, but they wanted to because they were proud of where they worked. All of that has to do with how we treat them. We respect them. We give them hope for a better career. We train them and develop them so when people wake up in the morning and want to do the job.

Most managers underestimate their leadership impact on the whole organization when they walk into the business in the morning. Being careful about what they say and do, paying attention to people, showing appreciation for them, recognizing them, giving them encouragement — all of those things we do for our kids. It’s kind of a simple approach but people are not paying enough attention to it. I work with companies around the the world to get culture right. Culture is not part of the game — it is the game. It’s everything.

Excellence is a state of mind. If you want it and everybody knows you want it and you declare it. When you declare something the whole world watches. When you declare it employees notice. I get pretty excited about getting people riled up to be great, not average.

In your book, you talk about people who consider customer service to be a “soft” issue; one that doesn’t impact the bottom line. What’s your response to these people?

If you don’t have the right relationship with your customers it will hurt your bottom line. Anybody who doesn’t focus on the “soft” stuff will never know how much more they could have made. Companies are finding this out around the world. There’s so much competition in the world today. Service is perhaps the last thing they can do if they’re a small business. Amazon and others are going to eat their lunch when it comes to price and delivery. Somebody asked me the other day: How do I protect my business? You have to be so good and your customers have to love you so much that they wouldn’t think of going to Amazon because you take care of them.

What lessons have you learned from your time spent serving in the Army and training overseas?

I joined the Army in 1964. I learned about discipline. I learned about serving. And I got pretty patriotic. For years I’ve been doing work with the military. I went to Iraq in 2011 and did 13 seminars for the military and the state department during the war. It was incredible. I have so much admiration for these people.

One day when I was writing this book I looked at my grandson Tristen, he was 10 years old and asked, “What does service mean to you?” He said, “Papi, when you serve you’re the giving one.” (Rule No. 22: Always Be The Giving One) The giving ones are those in our military, the fireman, the nurses, the first responders. We saw it in Boston the other day — the giving ones who go toward the problem and not away from it. That really has struck me my whole life. Really I try to wake up every morning and see how I can help people, not make their lives more miserable. So when somebody wants to meet with me, wants to see me or wants help I try to make myself available. It’s the least you can do, help a few people who need it.

What do ecology and customer service have to do with one another?

Ecology is about creating an environment. We’re all worried about the national environment right now and it’s polluted because we fill it every day with all kinds of air pollution and water pollution. The weather’s changing. It’s the same in a company. The leaders and managers have got to understand — there is an ecology. It’s fragile. The behavior is how it gets poisoned. The way they treat people and the way they respect people, include, listen, train, develop — all of these things contribute to an environment that’s either getting better or getting worse.

And don’t underestimate that that’s a big part of your job in a company is to create the right environment and be an ecologist (Rule No. 6: Be an Ecologist). Keep that top of mind. If you’re the guy in charge you don’t need to be doing everything that you hired people to do. You need to be making sure the right people are getting hired and getting them trained,  treating them great and and be a role model. All of this creates a great environment and culture. And that’s just the way I think about it.

When you go to work in the morning, when you get out of the car or get off the subway, when you walk in your office, there’s one of two things that can happen: You personally can make it better or you personally can make it worse. You’ve got to understand you control that. You make that decision. And once you start to think you can make it better you will make it better. Slowly but surely the environment will get better and better. There will be less turnover and your employees will be more inspired. They’ll give you 150% instead of 80% or 100%.

In The Customer Rules you talk about the importance of consistency when dealing with customers. What happens when you fail to deliver a consistent level of service?

If you don’t have consistency you disappoint people. People don’t like surprises. I think of it like a Broadway show. Whether it’s Disney or your own company, every company is putting on a big Broadway show. You’ve got the story you want to tell. Hopefully you’ve got the right actors — the people you’ve hired to work at the company. Hopefully you’ve got the right script (Rule No. 10: Be Your Own Shakespeare). Hopefully you’ve rehearsed it, rehearsed it and rehearsed it (Rule No. 12: Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse). You pull off the same show every day. You see the shows that stay on Broadway for 10 or 15 years and you have the shows that cancel after 3 weeks. That is a direct relationship to a consistently high quality of performance that gets everybody talking about it.

The point is, if you want to be great, everything matters. The website matters, how you answer the phone matters, your energy level matters, who you hire matters, cleanliness, friendliness, sanitation, how you communicate, how you’re available. Everything matters if you want to be great. If you’re not great today you’ll be out of business. Competition is fierce. Things can turn on a dime anymore. Companies better be on top of their game, every day. Don’t let it start to slide. If you want to win you have to be on top of your game, every day in every area.

What is your favorite example of a person going ‘above and beyond’ to deliver exceptional customer service?

I think about this a lot. We do remember these people and it happens so seldom that we go into shock. I’ll tell you one story from 9/11 that will blow your mind. That morning the planes hit and I had to shut down Walt Disney World in about 90 minutes. We got all the guests back in their hotel rooms. We picked up hotel charges for them because they couldn’t leave. We gave them free phone calls and free meals. Everybody was crying. We had a lot of people visiting from New York and New Jersey. A fireman was here and he wanted to get back to New York to help out. There were no rental cars, no flights, nothing. One of our bellman gave him the keys to his car and said, “Just take my car. I’ll come and get it later.” He didn’t even know the firefighter. I think about that and I’m just shocked.

A few years ago my wife, Priscilla, became so ill that she nearly died. Before heading in to perform her surgery, the doctor made us a promise: To fix her. It was supposed to be a four hour surgery and it ended up taking 9.5 hours. When the doctor came out I asked why it took so long, the doctor responded: “Because I did everything I told you I would; I fixed her.” He had stayed in the operating room despite back problems to deliver on his promise to fix her. These folks are the giving ones who really serve when your life is at risk (Rule No. 22: Always Be the Giving One).

And I think most parents are the ones who go above and beyond. Talk about the ones who serve. Your mother and father would do anything for you; they would come and get you 24/7 — that’s service. I said I’m going to write a book someday that’s called manage like your mother (Rule No. 5: Ask Yourself, “What Would Mom Do?”). Mothers are the best leaders in the world. They don’t care if you’re happy. They care if you’re successful. And they’ll do whatever they have to do to make you successful.

Lee Cockerell’s book, The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service, is available in print, audio and digital format at Amazon.com.

“With email, you could end up in four or five back and forth emails, which is time-consuming and increases your costs to resolution,” says Josh Tenby, who runs LivePerson’s North America Small Business Team. “With phones, you can only talk to one person at a time, so the cost per resolution is higher [than chat]. In chat, it’s very easy to jump from one chat to another without having a negative impact on the customer experience.” In fact, Tenby says that in many companies, chat agents handle three to four clients at a time.

STELLAService data from the past six months shows that phone and live chat response times were comparable across all retail verticals. The average response time to a live chat was about 1 minute, 10 seconds, compared to 1 minute, 30 seconds for phone and 13 hours for email.

Which channel was best for getting answers? Looking at resolution rates for the major retail categories for the past six months shows that issues were resolved 92% of the time on average over the phone, compared to an average of 88% for live chat and just 63% for email.

Live chat certainly seems like a good option for consumers and is increasingly compelling for retailers.

Live chat technology has progressed far beyond basic conversation. Nowadays, retailers can take advantages of features like file-sharing, desktop-sharing, video chat, pre-chat surveys, and customer segmentation. Pre-chat surveys help direct customers to the correct agent and allow agents to address issues more quickly, while customer segmentation can identify high-value customers based on geography or other information.

“If you’re running an ecommerce store out of New York and don’t deliver to the West Coast, you don’t want to engage anyone in California,” Tenby says. “High value clients are the ones who are based in New York, so you wouldn’t make the chat feature available to people coming from the West Coast.” In that scenario, the chat button simply wouldn’t be visible to those customers outside of the delivery area.

A customer abandoning a shopping cart with a value over a certain amount might also trigger an invitation to chat. “We’re channeling the brick and mortar store experience,” Tenby says. “The same way that you walk into a store, someone will come over and engage you based on certain actions.”

Some companies also use Google Analytics to determine when customers are dropping off the site and send a chat invitation after the customer has been on the site for a certain amount of time or clicks through a certain number of product pages.

Using the built-in proactive chat functionality of the LivePerson platform, companies can build and optimize invitation rules based on the number of visitor clicks, time spent on a particular page and other data to increase sales conversions over time. “Proactive chat is the direction that people are going in,” Tenby says.

CustomInk, a Virginia-based company that sells custom t-shirts online, is among the retailers using LivePerson’s chat features. Kate Rowinski, director of sales and service, says chat represents about 10 percent of the company’s total contacts. Many of the questions CustomInk gets are about t-shirt designs, so CustomInk’s chat agents help customers design their t-shirts in real time and send links to their designs in progress.

“Having the instant gratification of real-time help at your fingertips is a really important thing,” Rowinski says. “Customers tell us it’s very handy to have someone available on the spot to answer all their questions.”

Before adding live chat, Rowinski suggests that retailers answer as many questions as they can through a help center or FAQ page on their website. “Evaluate your site,” she says. “Have you offered everything you can?”

Hiring the right people to handle chat is also important. Rowinski says CustomInk hires chat agents who are comfortable with multitasking and familiar with emoticons and internet abbreviations. “We don’t speak the language to the customer but we need to understand it when they speak to us,” she says.

Many of the same etiquette rules used in call centers also apply to chat: use the customer’s first name, don’t leave the customer hanging, and make sure you’ve addressed all of their questions before signing off.

Kathie Hahn, owner of Delran, N.J.-based retailer My Safe Bird Store, includes handwritten notes with every order. “It goes to show that you care about your customers and I think it’s important to establish a relationship with your customers rather than them just treating them like someone who orders on a piece of paper,” she explains.

Each note includes Hahn’s name and the name of the person who pulled their order. The message in the note varies depending on the customer and the situation, but Hahn makes a point to address each note to the customer’s name. When customers post on Facebook about getting a new bird, for instance, the note might congratulate them on their new bird. “If it’s a customer that we haven’t heard from in a long time, we might write ‘hope all is well, how are you?’” adds Hahn.

That personalized attention to detail gets noticed by customers, who post about it in feedback on the site or on the My Safe Bird Store Facebook page. “For people who are bird people, their birds are family members,” says Hahn. “Birds can say ‘I love you,’ so bird people tend to think of their birds as family members even more than dog people.”

Other retailers send handwritten notes based on the circumstance. Big Dot of Happiness, a retailer in Menomonie, Wisc. that sells themed party kits, sends handwritten notes with orders within a certain range or in rare cases, a handwritten apology note when an order miships.

Brenda Knutson, the company’s ecommerce sales and marketing manager, says the handwritten notes are part of the company’s efforts to “dotify” everything, making the recipient feel as though they’re getting a gift themselves. “It comes in a bright blue box in a really cute bag with icons on it,” she says. “Usually the person planning the party doesn’t get much attention. Throwing a party can be stressful, but we try to make it fun.”

Often, notes include well wishes for the event, whether it’s a baby shower or child’s birthday party. “We want our customer service team to spend time on the phone learning about customers,” Knutson says. “Our customers share a lot with us so they might talk about a specific event, and we’d write ‘congratulations on celebrating your new grandbaby.’ It’s personal.”

Like My Safe Bird Store, Big Dot of Happiness gets positive feedback from customers on the notes. “They’ll say, ‘I can’t believe someone took the time to do that,’” Knutson says.

Other sites that have sent handwritten notes include chewy.com, crecentharbor.com and scrubsandbeyond.com. Still, as order volumes increase, are handwritten notes scalable?

Big Dot of Happiness has scaled back on handwritten notes because of the extra time required. “We try to make the decisions based on the impact it will have on the customers and the resource time we have,” says Knutson.

My Safe Bird Store has also dealt with the scalability issue thanks to considerable growth over the past year. However, Hahn has no plans to cut back. “If necessary, additional personnel will be hired in order to maintain our commitment to our customers, which includes personalized service,” she says.

Photo: An order from Scrubs & Beyond arrived with a personalized, handwritten thank you note from President Karla Bakersmith.

Previously on Happy Customer:

• Best Practices For Sprint Nextel Include Handwritten Letters 

“When it comes to peak season, our volume more than quadruples,” Bibi Brown, vice president of customer experience at 1-800-Flowers.com, told Happy Customer in an interview. “We expand to handle that volume and we know that customers are very impatient.”

The 1-800-Flowers.com social media customer service team staffs up to 30 agents to service orders during the company’s peak season, which Brown defined as Valentine’s Day through Mother’s Day. 1-800-Flowers.com also hires an additional 1,000 temporary agents during the peak holiday season.

Over the past year the company has seen a significant increase in customer engagement through social channels including Twitter and Facebook. In the off-peak season, roughly the end of May to January, social media inquiries represent just 1 to 2% of the total customer service inquiries received by 1-800-Flowers.com. During peak season, however, that number skyrockets to 25% of total service-related inquiries, Brown said.

During high-volume periods, customers who phone the company and are unable to reach an agent will often turn to social networks to resolve their issue. Customers eager to make contact with 1-800-Flowers.com this weekend are advised to reach out via Twitter or Facebook for a fast response.

“If they are social media customers, we recognized that we needed to respond very quickly in those channels,” she said. “Internally we have set a service level of responding to customers within five minutes.”

STELLAService analysts measured the service performance of nine online flower shops on Valentine’s Day this year, and 1-800-Flowers.com’s interactions via Twitter stood out from the pack, clocking an average response time of just one minute. The performance was so impressive that STELLAService over-sampled, analyzing 62 interactions that showed an average response time of just two minutes.

Building out a social customer service team and encouraging customers to use social networks as the primary contact method during their high-volume season was a reactionary move, Brown said.

“It was not planned — customer behavior led us down this path,” she said. “Our presence on Twitter and Facebook and the type of service offered by our consumer flower brand drove a lot of our customers to those channels.”

Ensuring the right staff members are servicing customers through social channels is essential to a good experience with the brand. 1-800-Flowers.com hand-selected the team of 30 from internal “top-tier” customer service agents based on knowledge and skill set. The selected agents received specialized training to ensure quality of interactions with the customer base, such as using the right tone at the right time. The team also relies on a set of standard replies, which were created and reviewed by everyone from customer service agents up to the company’s president, Chris McCann.

While the company is analyzing various tools to help track and deliver service-related messages over social networks and blogs, CSRs are logging in manually to Twitter and Facebook to search for brand mentions and publish messages and replies. The CSRs dedicated to social media also monitor Instagram feeds as well as blogs and other brand mentions across the web using Google Alerts.

For the company’s consumer flower brand, phone is still the primary channel for customer service. They also provide service through live chat and email. The key to a great customer experience, Brown noted, is to ensure their customers can transact through the channel of their choice in order to receive a quick resolution to their issue.

Photo: higetiger’s Flickr photostream/Creative Commons  

Previously on Happy Customer:

• Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, Gifts For Your Sweetie And Great Service Too
• Social Media Is The Sweetheart of Valentine’s Day Customer Service