Dialed into World-Class Customer Service
Headsets.com CEO Mike Faith turns up the volume
Customer service is one of those terms that I hear in the most general sense, but Mike Faith takes it to a new level—he’s a customer service fanatic.
Faith is the founder and CEO of Headsets.com, the leading headset supplier in North America with more than 1.3 million customers. He recently visited our M.S. in Business Analytics (MSBA) class to share about the importance of learning from customers.
Keeping the Customer Service Faith
The UC Davis MSBA program brings in tremendous guest speakers to engage with students, talk about various aspects of the professional world and describe the day-to-day challenges of their business and industry.
The 2019 speaker program started with a fantastic talk by Mike Faith. Thanks to Sanjay Saigal, the MSBA director of analytics strategy, we had the opportunity to meet a successful entrepreneur focused on selling premium office headsets and offering the highest quality customer service.
My biggest takeaway: The customer is the highest priority. Great service makes customers appreciate their purchase, become repeat buyers and tell others about the brand.
From the company perspective, Faith emphasized how important it is to have a positive and sincere approach towards the customer. The level of assistance during the service/purchase should extend following the purchase as these aspects contribute towards an employee’s attitude towards customer service.
As one example, they put Tootsie Rolls in every package they ship. “It’s weird and we’re not sure why we started doing it, but Customers love it,” the company’s website says.
MSBA Practicum: Clients are Our Customers
Faith also suggested guidelines of customer service that we could apply to our practicum projects for clients.
As ‘consultants’ for our industry partners, we should think of them as our customers and try to understand their requirements, empathize with their problem and go the extra mile to solve their problem.
CEO Hosts us at Headsets.com
Our career development team’s has encourage us to connect with executives, managers and decision makers we meet through our program. Taking that advice, I connected with Faith via LinkedIn and he was kind enough to invite several students to visit their offices in San Francisco.
Four classmates, Abhinav Chatterji, Ashwin Suresh, Ashish Ranshinge and Rohan Ranshinge, and I visited Headsets.com’s office to better understand how their business works. Faith was generous to share about his journey, challenges he faces and offered tips about how we could network more.
Customer service permeates the business. Walking into their office, you see a large banner prominently displayed that reads: “Did We Give World Class Customer Love Today?”
We had an opportunity to meet several Headsets.com employees and learned about their approach to customer service as well as the analytics work being done there using tools such as Google Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, and SQL. The experience gave us valuable insights about our future careers and working in the professional world.