When CEO Peter Clarkson founded
AC Lens in 1996, he ran it from the
back of an optometrist’s office.
The Columbus-based online contact lens
supply company had no overhead, no
backing from venture capitalists and no
expectations.
While other late ’90s Internet companies
worked hard to raise capital, Clarkson
chose to grow AC Lens organically
through its own cash flow.
“We’ve been profitable in every year of
our existence,” he says. “We started with
one employee, and we’ll probably
be over 30 employees by the end of
the year.”
AC Lens has grown revenue
about 116 percent since 2004, and
Clarkson expects 2007 revenue to
hit $20 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Clarkson about how he retains
customers through service and
employees through incentives.
Q: How can other CEOs grow their
companies the way you’ve grown
yours?
We learned early on that the
Internet is a business like any
other. We wanted to grow, and we
were willing to invest part of our
profits in marketing and infrastructure to support our growth.
We started with a view that the
company should be incremental
income to the optometrist’s practice, and then it outgrew the
practice, so we had to move out.
Now, we have about 19,000
square feet of integrated call center/warehouse that supports that.
I’ve always been able to sleep at night
because I’ve never been worried that we
wouldn’t have the cash to pay our employees at the end of the week.
Q: How important is customer service to
succeeding in business?
We actually spend a little bit more acquiring each customer than we make from
their first order, but we know from experience and from focusing on customer service that we have a very high retention rate.
It’s particularly important in the Internet
because customers could not be more
mobile. It’s something of a cliché, but your
competition is literally a click away.
We recognized that our product is somewhat specialized, and we needed experts
who are trained in-house and experienced in
dealing with that particular product to give
good service to the customers. Our average
call center and contact center agent has
been with us more than two years, and that’s
much higher than industry averages. That
kind of experience has been invaluable.
Q: How do you retain employees?
We’ve worked hard to incentivize our staff
based on things that matter to the company
overall, not so much on sales. For example,
every customer who orders from us receives
an e-mail survey about two weeks after they
order. We ask them questions about how
happy they are with the purchase.
The key question is, ‘Will you purchase
from us again?’ A response of ‘No. 1’ means
definitely not, and ‘No. 5’ means absolutely
yes. We average all of the responses, and all of our customer service people get a bonus
based on that average. The higher the number, the happier the customer is and the more
bonuses the customer service people get.
We call it a team incentive. Everybody
gets it, or everybody doesn’t. We started it
in 2001. Prior to that, we had very few
employees, and it was very hands-on. As
we’ve gotten bigger, we’ve had to try to
become more objective in our measures.
You have to incentivize your employees
throughout the building based on how the
company does, and it has to be relevant to
their job. Every person has to have a stake,
from the CEO to everyone else on down.
Q: How do you manage customer complaints?
For every 20 people who are unhappy,
you only hear from one of them. You
should take every customer complaint as
a blessing because the customer’s actually telling you about it. At some level, we’re
almost happy when we hear about some
problem because at least it’s something
we can work on and fix.
Bottom line is, everybody makes mistakes. Obviously, if the mistake is repeated, that’s bad. Sometimes when someone’s
made a mistake, we realize that the
process in our technology was wrong.
Of course, sometimes it was just bad
luck. If the post office or FedEx loses a
package, there’s nothing much we can do
about it, but if they lose enough of them, we
would start looking at another shipping
company.
Q: What one thing can prevent a company
from growing?
If you don’t take care of your customers,
they’ll walk. There’s plenty of competition;
it’s one of the great things about our system.
If you don’t take care of your customers, it
doesn’t matter how much money and energy you spend on marketing to get new ones,
you won’t succeed.
The No. 1 piece of advice for anybody is,
love what you’re doing, get real pleasure out
of it, and then it won’t be like work. You’ll be
providing jobs for people and building
something worthwhile for the community.
HOW TO REACH: AC Lens, www.aclens.com or (614) 921-9892
