It's All About the O

Megan and I attended the AMA luncheon yesterday and really enjoyed the event speaker, Stormy Simon from Overstock.com. Her presentation explained how Overstock's marketing department and customer care department "tied the knot" (with a few Pacman and Ms. Pacman references thrown in). One executive is responsible for overseeing the marketing department and the customer care department, opening communication between both departments at all times, and thus it has evolved into a perfect union!

Ms. Simon is even copied on emails to customers that have had problems with their orders if their complaint is not resolved the first time around. She gave us a recent example: A customer ordered an ottoman, and it arrived broken to the customer. So, Overstock sent him another ottoman; but that one arrived broken too. So Overstock sent him another one; same thing - broken. By the time Ms. Simon was added to the communication loop on the arrival of the third broken ottoman, the ottomans were out of stock. Ms. Simon called the customer and spoke with him directly. He said that this was taking up a lot of his time receiving broken ottomans and then calling Overstock each time to report it, and he mentioned that he wouldn't buy from them again. Ms. Simon says that she has the customer scheduled in her Outlook to call him 6 months from now to see if he'll reconsider buying from Overstock again.

She touched on how their website has evolved and how they are approaching social media.

And you know the familiar spokesmodel in their TV commercials? Ms. Simon says that are constantly going back and forth on if they should stay with that same look/messaging or try something different. Guess we'll see!

Overstock.com is currently rated #2 in customer service nationwide, as announced by The National Retail Federation.