For all their pollable loyalty, though, mail shoppers are a fickle lot who don't bond with some impersonal logo simply out of past favors. To keep them ringing the switchboard at PCC (and at MacConnection, a division formed in 1984 to deal exclusively with Macintosh-oriented accessories) requires hands-on attentiveness beyond self-deprecating ads ("Only a five-day drive from Silicon Valley," reads another). Thus, in an age when mail merchants still abuse their customers by expecting them to wait six weeks for delivery (and nonetheless charging their credit cards immediately), CEO Hall spirits merchandise to his customers the next day.
Traditional mail-order operations selling traditional lines of goods don't approach PCC's turnaround time mostly because they don't need to, Hall says. "Their customers don't expect to get products tomorrow. But when computer users order something, usually it's because they need it to solve immediate problems. Speed is what they expect." PCC's internal systems are so swift that even if an order is phoned into New Hampshire as late as 7:59 the night before, the goods are on doorsteps as far away as California by next day's close. Not at the double-digit price of some carrier's blue-ribbon treatment, either, but at a flat $3 for the entire order.
Yet even PCC's own in-house professionals had advised Hall it couldn't be done. No expert himself, of course Hall insisted it could. "A buck a pound the world around" became his rallying cry. He invited five next-day carriers -- UPS, Federal Express, Emory, Purolator, and Airborne -- to take a crack at it for a couple of weeks each. "They all laughed and said they couldn't even come close," Hall recalls. But when he described some schemes for cost reduction, "the price came into the realm of possibility, and they started getting psyched about it." When the dust settled, Airborne had gotten the contract.
In one step-saver, PCC packers cram the individual cartons into specially curved containers that conform to the inside of a cargo carrier, so they can be moved from the warehouse to the plane without further handling. Whatever spillover can't be carried on Airborne's flight from Manchester, N.H., to its private hub in Ohio is trucked to Boston -- a one-hour stint. When they get to Ohio, the packages are shipped the world around (though not yet for a buck a pound). PCC's computerized system compiles weight and destination information and transmits it directly to Airborne's computers. At the moment the truck leaves the warehouse in New Hampshire, Airborne's people in Ohio know exactly how much fuel to put in each of that night's planes. "We definitely set new standards of delivery," crows Hall, who, to make sure no potential savings had been overlooked, has calculated the cost of PCC's owning its own planes.
PCC constantly receives letters of amazed appreciation from customers who get merchandise faster from PCC than they could have from the corner computer store. A medical-equipment distributor in Pennsylvania wrote last winter that he had received an urgent request for intricate price proposals that had to arrive at a distant hospital convention by noon the next day. It seemed impossible, since Federal Express had already closed. A last hope for a stiff commission was to acquire a fax device for his Macintosh -- but pronto. PCC's time-stamp shows that the order was received at 7:54 p.m. and that the plug-in board was packed and ready to be picked up at 9:07 p.m. The salesman's records show that he received said item at 9:00 the next morning and that he faxed the quote by 10:30. Total freight: $3. Exactly what Sears, Roebuck would have charged for express freight to Pennsylvania -- in 1902.
But Hall, a formidable worrier, isn't resting easy. "Now that we've shown them how," he frets, "they can do it for the competition, too." To keep also-rans at bay, by the time they gear up to guarantee next-day delivery of an order phoned in by 8:00 p.m., Hall intends to have pushed his own deadline ahead to 9:00 and eventually to midnight. And now that the heavy-duty overhead wires are in, he is shooting for a one-ring answering response, followed by a one-minute order-taking interlude. "Once they decide they want something," Hall has determined, "no one likes to wait on the phone just to ask for it." (That's not entirely true. PCC's music-on-hold is so appealing that one customer whose serenade was interrupted by a live voice asked to be put back on hold until the piece was over.)
The ante may climb further still: PCC shells out extra for polystyrene packing "peanuts" that have been rendered static-free, so that they won't cling to the recipient on arrival. At that, fake goobers may not be good enough for the environmentalist in him: Hall is considering spending yet more for edible clusters of popcorn, which will be disposed of the way nature intended.
In the shallow trenches of deep discounting, it's daunting enough to pay for the likes of popcorn and peanuts while swallowing minuscule margins. But giving away a vid-eocassette and at the same time amortizing its production is, to most minds, unthinkable. Yet a PCC-recorded cassette is what buyers of certain accessories are finding in shipments this year. The tapes document fussy procedures that, like fussy children, are meant to be seen, not heard. In a taped demonstration of how to install a hard-disk drive, a PCC tech-staffer spends 20 minutes mucking around in the bowels of a computer, yanking cables and screws with the relish of a butcher eviscerating a turkey.
"It wasn't a luxury, it was a necessity," insists Hall of the $2 million he's plowed into constructing a top-of-the-line television production and broadcast facility. Expensive, maybe, but when such costs are applied against the increasing massiveness of PCC's sales base they become manageable, Hall argues, not one to give a P&L unwarranted scrutiny if nothing's broken. Besides, he expects that not only will the output of the new division, PCTV, cut its parent's customer-relations costs, but it will generate income as well.
The arithmetic goes roughly like this: a $3-or-so instruction tape frees up perhaps 15 minutes for a $20-an-hour technical-support person, who otherwise would be hassled repeatedly on the phone with the same predictable questions. Balance: $2 in the company's favor, applied by a growing business to not having to put the next technical-support person on the payroll so soon. PCC will eventually broadcast via satellite, saving on the cost of videocassettes, and a good part of the company's internal apprenticeship and product training will be prepackaged on video, saving on teaching costs as well.
