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

For example, if a customer calls us up and says [he’s] really interested in a product, and we don’t have that particular product, our phone team member will jump on Google, do a little research, determine where the customer can get that product, and then call or e-mail that potential customer back and give them information on how to get that product, even if we aren’t the ones to sell it to them. We will have served them, we will have shocked them with our willingness to go out of our way to do something nice for them, and hopefully they’ll contact us again. We’ll also add their e-mail address to our list, and that’s been a way we’ve been able to grow very quickly. And because it’s only affecting those 20 percent of our customers who actually call in, it doesn’t break the bank for us. Everybody talks about offering knock-your-socks-off customer service, where you generate these “Wow!” interactions and the customer hangs up and says to himself, “I’ve never received this kind of care or service.” So rather than measuring the average time per call, we don’t pay much attention to that at all, we pay attention to the number of people who e-mail us or call us with extreme praise for how they’ve been treated. We know they’re spending a lot of money on their horses, and we treat them well.