A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

We have a different model where, for example, our phone team aren’t referred to as customer service reps, because they aren’t. They spend a substantial portion of their time doing marketing tasks and selling activities. They have a very different form of compensation. Because 80 percent of our transactions happen automatically on a computer as part of our continuity business, it’s either self service or an automatic transaction. We’re interacting with only about 20 percent of the shipments. Most of our competitors have about 20 percent to 30 percent of their business on the Web and very limited continuity. We have the inverse relationship. We talk to about 20 percent of our orders, they talk to about 70 percent to 80 percent. We can afford to pay our people better, train them more, give them a lot more flexibility to have long, involved conversations with customers and to do research on behalf of the customer.