CRM Success: Overstock.com Places Fourth in Overall Customer Service

Overstock.com, has announced that it placed fourth in the 2007 NRF Foundation/American Express (News - Alert) Customer Service Survey. Katherine Mance, vice president of the NRF Foundation, said "According to shoppers, Overstock.com is one of the brightest stars for customer service."

When the NRF Foundation /American Express Customer Service Survey list debuted two years ago, Overstock.com did not appear among the top 50 companies. Last year, Overstock.com shot to number four on the list and repeated the feat again this year.

Stormy Simon, Overstock senior vice president, branding and customer care, attributes the rise to a careful restructuring of the company's customer care department. Ms. Simon's efforts began in 2005 when she assumed management of the department and set up certification and online education programs for customer care agents as well as installing CRM software by RightNow Technologies (News - Alert).

The NRF Foundation is the research and education arm of the National Retail Federation. The NRF Foundation/American Express Customer Service Survey polled 8,877 consumers and was conducted by consumer marketing intelligence firm BIGresearch from September 4-11, 2007. Consumers answered the open ended question, "Which retailer delivers the best customer service?"

In the summer of 2006 CRM vendor RightNow Technologies announced that its contact center products were selected by Overstock.com to "help the online retailer increase the quality and efficiency of customer interactions across all contact centers and communication channels," according to RightNow officials.

RightNow will provide Overstock.com with products for its internal contact center, its domestic and overseas outsourcers, and its web and voice self-service systems. In addition, RightNow's products will be designed to unify these separate operations into a single customer care environment to "help Overstock.com achieve a consistent high-quality experience across phone, e-mail and web channels," RightNow officials say.

The wonderfully-named Stormy Simon said at the time RightNow was "providing us with the technology and services we need to… control our service and support costs."

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David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

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