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March 29, 2008

A timely response from Kayak CTO Paul English

(Sorry for the delay in posting this, but my excuse involves a hard drive failure, a clean room and much gnashing of teeth.)

Last week, I received a personal response from Kayak CTO Paul English after I blogged about a nasty post on their corporate blog that was published in response to a customer inquiry.

When I contacted him, I indicated that I'd share his response here. I've redacted his personal contact info, but here's his message:

Hi Walter,

As I already said -- we screwed up. I pulled the dumb blog entry quickly for obvious reasons. This is common business practice.

Let me tell you a little bit about customer support at Kayak...

We have 50 employees, and last month we processed over 34 million consumer queries for travel. Any time any consumer has a question and contacts us - by phone or by instant message or by email - they get a personal response from me, or from my cofounder, or from one of our engineers or other team members.

Do you know any other major brand Internet companies who require that their company provide personal responses to every customer inquiry?

(FYI, I have a large screen monitor hung outside my office which charts our feedback response volume and response time per employee. And FYI, I'm usually in the top three of responders, even though I travel extensively.)

I am obsessed with customer service. Which is why I make our "overpaid" :) engineers do customer service. So we can connect with customers every day, having every Kayak employee learning from customers every single day.

Do you know other major brand Internet companies where every engineer (not just some customer service department) communicates with customers every day?

Walter, I do take this stuff seriously.

I'm sorry we screwed up. But I'm glad you called us on it.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to speak about this stuff at any time.

I'm glad to know that Kayak takes customer service so seriously, but I think a point I made earlier still stands -- they didn't see their blog as part of an integrated community/customer service strategy.

Perhaps this was a teaching moment -- a commenter here directed my attention to a helpful, recent post over at Kayak that offers real value and directly addresses customers'needs..

Posted by Your Protagonist at March 29, 2008 02:21 PM