Catalogers of the Year

Catalog Success congratulates Marilynne Eichinger on her continued passion and for winning this award.

B-to-B Cataloger of the Year
By Donna Loyle

During the past two years, Headsets.com, a San Francisco-based Internet and catalog merchant of telephone headsets to businesses, has recorded a housefile-growth increase of 270 percent, from 22,882 to 61,783. And its annual revenues have gone up 268 percent to $17.2 million during that time period.

Not too shabby for a company established just in 1998 that’s been mailing a print catalog for only the last three years.

Its founder and driving force is Mike Faith, a Briton who, in 1990, came to America with his wife and two suitcases after selling everything they owned. Faith worked in sales and marketing before striking out on his own. He started two companies, bought headsets for those companies, and found that the products were not as good as he had anticipated.

A born entrepreneur, Faith invested $40,000 in a new venture he called Headsets.com, asked two of his former employees to work at the new venture, and in only five weeks, they were open for business on the Internet.

Customer Service is King

Faith and his team at Headsets.com are well-regarded as customer service fanatics. Faith defines great customer service in this way: “The customer service team takes responsibility for customer satisfaction. They own the customers and their jobs.”

Like other catalogers, Headsets.com uses several methods to measure and track its customer service results, including returns rates and reasons, traditional metrics such as percentage of calls answered within four rings, and so on. It goes a step further than most, however, by setting benchmarks such as answering all e-mails in two hours or less.

The company also actively solicits direct customer feedback. For example, every outgoing package includes a customer survey, and customers who complete it get a $10 voucher good on future purchases. The surveys, says Faith, are designed to ask questions in a way to solicit constructive criticism, not just praise. Customers even are asked to rate, from excellent to below average, the customer service representative (CSR) with whom they dealt. “Anything below excellent is considered a failure,” he says.