E-commerce Blog

Please note: this is an excerpt from a recent press release.

AUSTIN, TEXAS - BigCommerce-powered online stores around the world have now processed over $600 million in sales, with $150 million in the first two months of 2012.

The BigCommerce platform has processed 5.7 million orders and a staggering 28.8 million items. 1.3 million orders and 6.2 million items have already been sold in 2012 alone.

BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform allowing anyone to start and run their own online store in just a few clicks. The ease of use and power of the platform has helped drive these huge numbers for anyone using BigCommerce.

BigCommerce takes care of everything, giving entrepreneurs powerful tools to sell and promote products through a web store, iPhone, Android, iPad, Facebook, multiple shopping comparison websites and more.

“There’s a huge shift from traditional bricks and mortar retailing to e-commerce, and these figures show just how quickly that shift is occurring” said Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce.

“E-commerce is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but it’s a must have for businesses of all sizes, and a platform like BigCommerce not only makes it easy to get a beautiful store online, but also lets our merchants drive huge amounts of traffic to their online stores using our 25+ built-in marketing tools, such as Google Product feeds, three-click sell on eBay and SocialShop to sell on Facebook.” added Mitchell Harper, co-founder and CEO of BigCommerce.

“We think every single small business should be selling online and we’re doing whatever we can to make that happen”.

A few months back, I published my introductory blog on the BigCommerce website and had the opportunity to share a little bit about myself.

Since coming aboard BigCommerce, one of my goals has been to shift the focus of our Support Ninjas toward insuring every interaction they had with customers was nothing short of “awe-inspiring”.  If you remember from my original post, one of the principles that has helped me build successful support organizations is:

“The quality of a single interaction between the employee and the client is more important than the quantity of interactions overall.”

Inbound support centers are traditionally measured on how fast they answer calls and the reps on how closely they stick to a prescribed length of call.  Maybe that’s okay if your measurement of success is how fast a call is answered.

But that’s not the way I see it.

I had just dropped off a rental car last week at the end of a business trip and was treated quite rudely by the staff over what I believed to be a very minor issue.  I brushed it off as I need to catch my flight home but made a mental note to contact the company over the weekend to voice my concern about the lapse in service; something this company was well known for.

I had a chance a few days later to call the company and was impressed that after dialing the number and entering my loyalty program number, I was immediately connected with a rep who had my account up on their screen and asked “how can I help?”.

Unfortunately it all went downhill from there.  The employee became quite defensive about the issue and satisfaction from my perspective was never achieved.  I hung up feeling frustrated and vowing to move my business to another rental car company.

So, how much did it matter how quickly my call was picked up?  Not one whit…

Here at BigCommerce, we recently introduced what’s known as a Balanced Scorecard to be used for measuring the performance of all staff at every level of the Client Success department (all the way up to me!).  And the single biggest change we made is weighting 75% of our scoring on customer satisfaction as measure by you who we send surveys too.  The remaining 25% of the score is based on the efficient use of our reps time, not their average call time!

I recently watched an old Tony Robbins video on the 4 steps to achieve success, and our implementation of the Balanced Scorecard is a perfect example of what he teaches:

1. Know Your Outcome!  Our desired outcome is a world-class support experience on every customer interaction.
2. Take Action!  Weighting the Balanced Scorecard with more on the customer experience aligns our staff’s performance with the desired outcome.
3. Know What You’re Getting!  What we’re getting is the feedback from our customers via the surveys we send out asking to rate the reps performance.  This is critical toward accomplishing step 4.
4. Change Your Approach!  We changed the approach to measuring our performance, but the feedback we get (the good and the bad) from great customers like you through surveys will ultimately drive how we evolve.

Great progress has been made over the past year as you can see from the chart.  We’ve focused on making sure we have the right amount of staff and have seen our call answer time go from 7 minutes to less than 3.  But more importantly, we’re concentrating our efforts to provide a world-class level of service and our Customer Satisfaction scores have risen reflect our efforts!

We still have room to grow, and that’s what motivates us every day!