Customer Service: The Last Word

Profile of a software company whose quality and superb customer service result in word-of-mouth sales.

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Customer Service:The Last WordPicture this. The products you bring to market are direct hits with your customers, higher in quality and lower in price than your competitors', and completely and flawlessly supported after the sale. A small company's pipe dream?Not if you're Intuit

This past February, on the day postal rates jumped from a quarter to 29¢, I visited my local post office. So did a lot of other people. Not that anything was different there. The clerks had still opened only one window out of a possible three, thus creating a line that was 10 deep. And the one guy on duty had run out of 4¢ stamps.

OK, so the post office hasn't yet discovered customer service. But every other organization seems to have gone nuts over it. Hotels virtually beg you to fill out those little cards telling them where they messed up. Retailers trumpet their money-back guarantees, manufacturers their toll-free numbers. (Questions? Complaints? Call 1-800-WELOVE-U.) Banks -- banks! -- stay open later and promise no-hassle loan applications. Or at least they did before they quit lending money.

Most companies, of course, stop right there. They want customers to feel fawned over, but they rarely seem to care whether those same customers actually go away happy. My health club, for example, uses the ubiquitous tell-us-how-we-can-do-better cards. But do the people who run it really need me to tell them the rowing machines are busted half the time? And if they cared about customer satisfaction, as opposed to the semblance of customer service, wouldn't they just fix the damn machines?

The fact is, the icons of customer service -- 800 numbers, guarantees, suggestion cards, and surveys -- have become no more than a ticket of admission to today's marketplace. They no longer confer a competitive advantage; indeed, they may even be liabilities. (Customers who get curt responses from that toll-free line will be madder than if they had never called.) They cost money, and they don't deliver commensurate benefits.

And yet, as long as we're on the subject of customer service, let your imagination run wild. Suppose your company could really satisfy its customers. Suppose you could provide a product or service that was better than they expected, for less money than anybody else charged. Suppose that every time you brought out something new it was just what buyers wanted. Suppose your after-sale service was so good that customers with problems went away feeling better than before.

What would happen? Easy -- you'd own your marketplace. People would buy from you over and over again, would relish the experience, would never even dream about doing business with anybody else. They would proselytize on your behalf, telling their friends and associates to buy from you. You'd hardly need salespeople.

Impossible, you say. Farfetched. Then again, you haven't met Scott Cook, and you probably don't know much about his company, Intuit Inc. All those statements apply to Intuit. Better yet, Cook has figured out how to build that kind of customer orientation into the organizational bricks and mortar of his company.

"Operating without a safety net," the 38-year-old president calls it. Or "the Toyota approach." Or simply "getting it right." Whatever -- it's partly a matter of management techniques, partly a matter of fundamental philosophy. And it's what sets Cook's company way, way apart from the competition.

Intuit makes microcomputer software. Its flagship product is Quicken, a program that allows consumers and small businesses to write checks and keep track of their finances on a personal computer. Owning the marketplace? Quicken is probably the most successful personal-finance program ever written, holding a market share estimated at 60%. "It has become the brand-name product in what would otherwise be a commodity business," says Jeffrey Tarter, editor of the industry publication Softletter. "It's the Kleenex or Xerox of its market." Intuit, accordingly, has been exploding. It ranked #15 on the 1990 Inc. 500. Revenues last year hit $33 million, up from $19 million the year before. After-tax earnings were into double digits.

Granted, the software industry has always been populated by hotshot fast-growth companies. But Intuit doesn't fit the conventional mold. Unlike, say, Lotus, it started without venture capital or other early advantages. (See box, "Wager: One Company," page 5.) Unlike VisiCorp or Wordstar, it has dominated its marketplace through several generations of software, beating back waves of would-be competitors. Consumers yank Quicken off the shelves virtually unbidden. Intuit sold close to a million units in 1990. Its product is carried by retailers all over the country, by Target stores and Wal-Marts as well as computer chains. Yet the company's sales force numbers exactly two.

So what moves the goods? Asked that question, founder and president Scott Cook peers mock-earnestly through his thick glasses, allowing only the hint of a grin to cross his face. "Really," he says innocently, "we have hundreds of thousands of salespeople. They're our customers." Suddenly missionary-sober, he adds that he wants his customers to be "apostles" for Quicken. Intuit's mission is to "make the customer feel so good about the product they'll go and tell five friends to buy it."

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