You're Not Lost if You Can Still See the Truck

by Bill Heavey

  I killed my computer the other day, an action I can’t recommend highly enough. The cause of death was coffee, the original smart weapon. Pour some into a human and he becomes alert and productive. Spill even a few drops on a laptop and that sucker checks right into the digital version of the Long Pine Condo. In memoriam, I decided to go fishing. The perch were running, so I called my friend Paula, who not only keeps tabs on the annual run but also curses better than anybody I know.

  She was waiting at the dock when I showed up. Selecting her favorite rowboat, one of the seventy-year-olds that know the river the best, she steered us down to an ancient sycamore leaning out over the water. “Drop the rock and let out enough line so we’re clear of them,” she said, nodding her chin upward. A dozen cormorants perched above us, ready for any shad venturing near the surface. “You do not want a [expletive] cormorant to crap on you,” she said. “Trust me, honey. That [expletive] stuff is like battery acid.” As if on cue, something white and semisolid splatted into the water not ten feet away.

  Five hours later, my hands numb from filleting a couple dozen iced-down fish (“It’s [expletive] hell on your hands, but it keeps the fish from going mushy,” Paula explained), I realized I was going to be late to pick up my daughter. I drove home, dumped the rods, threw the fish in the fridge, and raced to school. Emma came over at a gallop. “Retta’s mom is taking some kids to her grandma’s house at Lake Barcroft,” she announced breathlessly. “Can we go? Can we?” Ten minutes later, we were caravanning to a tiny private lake in a community so upscale you can probably be fined if caught doing your own yard work. We were six kids, two moms, and one fishy-smelling dad. The kids ran for the beach, screaming and kicking sand at one another.

  “We wanna go fishing!” they declared. Retta’s mom said sorry, the fishing rods were locked up at Grandma’s. I had no rods, but I had hooks and mono in my tackle bag and a knife in my pocket. And I’d noticed a grove of bamboo by the parking lot.

  “Who wants to go fishing?” I called. A tide of screaming children charged straight toward me. Just in time, I yelled, “Who thinks they can find some worms?” The tide split around me as kids began turning over rocks and logs. I cut six lengths of bamboo and began stripping the branches off. (The trick, I found, is to snap them off briskly rather than peel them.)

  Measuring lengths of mono two feet longer than the rods, I attached line to pole and hook to line. I baited each with a worm, and whenever a child dared express a preference for a pole other than the one I was handing him, I recited the one phrase no parent can do without: “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” One by one, they ran down to the water. The lone holdout was an older boy, Jonah, a fourth grader.

  “Don’t you want to fish?” I asked.

  “No, that’s okay, I’m good,” he said, playing it cool, as a fourth grader will when faced with the unknown and its looming potential for failure and embarrassment.

  “Oh, man!” I said. “Try it. When I was your age, fishing was all I wanted to do.” I pushed the rod into his hands and told him I’d come check on him in a minute.

  A first grader, Ian, went through five worms in short order. He would return and wordlessly hold up the bare hook for rebaiting, as patient and determined as a cop awaiting the world’s last donut. Shrieks of triumph began to erupt here and there along the shore, followed by the hoisting of a bluegill in the 2–3 inch class. At last Ian connected, racing up and down the sand. “I did it!” he kept crooning. “A fish!” Ten minutes later, Jonah, still fishless, was facing the special humiliation of being the oldest kid and the only one to fail.

  “Fish like places they can hide and ambush other fish,” I said gently. “Sticks and stuff.” He moved his line over to a visible stump end. A minute later he had a live one flopping in the grass and a two-hundred-watt glint in his eye. “Yes!” I said, high-fiving him. One of the smaller first graders, John, wandered over to examine Jonah’s fish.

  “Black crappie,” he said. “Everybody else caught little pumpkinseeds.” John’s father is an angler, his mom told me, and the boy is a maniac for field guides of all sorts.

  “Wow,” I said. “Sounds to me like you know nearly everything there is to know about fish.”

  “Well, yeah, pretty much,” he said, then explained, “I’ve been to Florida.”

  “It shows,” I said.

  When it was time to go, we stashed the poles in a bush, ready for the next time we came back. As we headed to the cars, I felt as if I were walking six inches off the ground, like I was the catcher in the rye. I’d hooked six kids and a bunch of perch. It was as good a day’s work as I can remember doing in my life.

  ALWAYS ON CALL

  If you close your eyes, you can almost imagine the sound is a distant mountain stream picking its way down through rocks and riffles. Open them and your trout fishing fantasy snags on the inescapable reality of a windowless and fluorescently lit room the size of half a football field. The carpeting, walls, and 144 cubicles here are beige. Throughout, women and men babble endlessly into headsets, their voices merging into a low hum, the sound of the well-oiled machine that is Cabela’s, the “World’s Foremost Outfitter.”

  This is the Customer Service Center in Kearney, Nebraska, one of five in the state. On a day like this in early May, the company is almost coasting: 120 operators on the phones at any particular moment handling about 15,000 calls a day. During peak season, October through January, there will be 500 people handling 100 calls each per day. That’s 50,000 interactions, the vast majority of which result in orders. All around me, the operators—Cabela’s calls them customer relations associates, or CRAs—are fielding inquiries about Cross-Lok snap-swivels and logo T-shirts, ATV harrow drags and women’s wildlife boxer shorts, Hevi-Shot Dead Coyote shotshells and the kid’s video chair in Seclusion 3D camo (so that your child can partake of the outdoor lifestyle while playing Feeding Frenzy on his Xbox).

  CRAs are highly trained and talented people who are adept at working with the public, a skill I’ll later test in myself. After all, what’s the point of coming all the way out here and not damaging the company’s reputation in the eyes of at least one loyal customer?

  Channeling the Outdoors

  Standing on the other end of the telephone line like this, I’m intrigued by what a complex dance it is, Cabela’s and you. The company’s strategy has never been to be the cheapest. Wal-Mart has pretty much cornered that market. What Cabela’s is selling is something different altogether: a brand that associates you with the outdoor lifestyle. Cabela’s wants you to think of its wares whether your dream trip is car camping at the local lake for catfish, or hopping a private jet to Tierra del Fuego for sea-run brown trout. It knows you won’t place your next order unless you’re satisfied with your last one, so if you aren’t happy with what shows up, you’re welcome to send it back for a full refund or exchange. Above all else, Cabela’s is betting that superior customer service will keep Americans responding to the more than 120 million catalogs it sends out annually under seventy titles, from Tackle Craft to Home & Cabin. Cabela’s is a juggernaut (publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2004) that last year broke the $2 billion mark in revenues for the first time in its history. It owns about 5½ percent of the outdoor market, roughly twice that of Bass Pro Shops. When I visited, managers were still celebrating Cabela’s ranking as No. 15 in BusinessWeek’s top-25 list of major American companies for customer service excellence.

  Like any for-profit company, Cabela’s wants your money. It also wants to keep you coming back. To do so, it has evolved from its roots as a catalog-only operation into a “multichannel” (the new industry buzzword) retailer, with catalog, Internet, and bricks-and-mortar components. As of summer 2014 there are fifty-seven stores operating in the United States and Canada, with plans to open another seventeen soon. These are big “destination” stores, averaging 150,000 square feet, buil
t to have what the company calls a “contagious, electric atmosphere” with museum-quality wildlife dioramas, natural wood and stone materials, aquariums, waterfalls, live fish, laser shooting arcades, and candy shops. Cabela’s likes to say it “brings the outdoors indoors” in its stores, converging design, atmosphere, and merchandise to create this sensation. The average length of a customer’s visit is three and a half hours. Some families stay much longer, planning their vacations around visits during which they shop, eat, play, and look. What this means is that for some of us who supposedly enjoy the outdoors, a vacation means driving a long distance to park and then spend the time indoors.

  A Smooth Operator

  Many a wife wishes her husband would remember a birthday or anniversary half as easily as he does that famous toll-free number: 800-237-4444. Dial those digits and here’s what you don’t get: a recording instructing you to listen closely because the menu options have changed, directives to push 1 for English or 2 para español, or a guy in Bangalore trying to make you believe he knows all about ice fishing. Instead, you get something that is rapidly becoming as rare as fried panda on a stick: a live American asking how she or he can help you today.

  You get somebody like Nancy Sayles, fifty-eight, who taught primary school until the apathy of her students’ parents drove her crazy. She also worked in a factory that made air filters and assisted a manager at Nutrisystem before signing on part-time and discovering that she is a natural at telephone sales. Right now, she’s talking to a guy who’s interested in a Humminbird 565 fish finder with dual-beam sonar and a 60-degree area of coverage. He wants the deluxe model, the one that gives your speed and the water temperature. It runs $229.95. It’s Thursday and he needs it by Monday. Can they do that?

  “We sure can,” Sayles chirps and repeats back his shipping address. But she makes a mistake, saying “street” rather than “avenue,” an error the customer impatiently corrects. “So it is,” she says, unflappable. “The old bifocals, don’t you know.” His only reply is “Yep.” But suddenly the whole tenor of the call has changed. Sayles’s throwaway explanation of the mistake, “the old bifocals,” and her lack of defensiveness have somehow bridged the gap across the wires. She has, in effect, let the customer know that he is speaking to another human being, one who knows her business, and likes her customers. What could have been an annoyance has instead become an endearing asset. It’s a quiet victory for the company, an experience that may not even break into the customer’s conscious awareness, but which registers nonetheless. “That comes to $267.89 with the three-day shipping,” she says. It’s his move now. He stalls, makes the universal tongue-clicking sound of somebody mulling over his options. “Would you like to place that order?” she asks sweetly after ten seconds of dead air. “I guess so,” he says. Sold.

  They Know What You Did Last Summer

  The array of information available to the person answering your call is now so sophisticated and extensive that more than one customer has been convinced that Cabela’s telephone operators are psychic. The No. 1 customer complaint is not getting an order by the promised date, so detailed tracking information is available for each shipment. Nancy Sayles recalls an irate man calling to complain that his order hadn’t arrived. She brought it up and saw that the delivery driver had put the box in the customer’s vehicle, something commonly done when bad weather prevents access to the front door. Her notes specified a red pickup in the driveway. “I asked if they’d been getting snow recently. ‘Yes,’ he answered. I asked if he had a red pickup. ‘How’d you know that?’ he said. I asked if he’d looked in the truck. He put the phone down, went outside, and came back in with his package. ‘Wow!’ he kept saying. ‘How’d you do that?’”

  Every caller’s name, address, and order history is displayed automatically when the phone is answered by a CRA: your past business with the company, every item you’ve ever purchased, dollar amounts, and how much merchandise was returned. “So when you get some guy who says he’s ordered dozens of times, you know if that’s true.” The software is also useful for crank calls from kids. “You just ask to speak to their parents using a first name and they hang up pretty quick.”

  Software can’t do everything, however, and the human element leads to interesting stories. Sayles remembers one time when a special offer changed in the middle of an order. “It came up so fast, I flubbed the words. It changed to a lure kit. I was trying to say, ‘These lures swim erratically,’ but I said, ‘These lures swim erotically,’ and I got so embarrassed! I apologized, but the gentleman on the phone just said, ‘I believe I’ll take two just in case you were right the first time.’”

  Every customer relations associate has war stories:

  •A customer called asking about a mesh vest. “That mesh, now, does that have holes in it?”

  •Somebody returned a toilet seat after a year because his wife got tired of looking at the fishing lures embedded in the clear acrylic. Even though Cabela’s does not resell used toilet seats, he received a credit. He was a good customer. You want to keep a guy like that happy. And if it takes accepting a used toilet seat, well, okay.

  •A guy wanted a refund for a broken fishing rod, explaining that it had failed while he was fighting a big alligator. It wasn’t an accidental hookup. He’d been targeting gators. He did not get a refund.

  •A customer from New York City kept ordering and returning cuckoo clocks. After the third return, he was asked the reason. “Everybody knows that if you pack cuckoo clocks in cardboard, it makes the cuckoo louder. But you guys keep doing it anyway!” Orders for cuckoo clocks from that individual are no longer accepted.

  •One man asked how loud a Gamo pellet gun was. About like a .22, he was told. The next sounds were the cocking of a rifle and a shot. “Damn! That is loud!”

  •A bailiff was whispering his order into his phone as court was about to convene. He paused to announce, “All rise!” then resumed ordering.

  The Gear Gurus

  Cras are well versed in both the habits of callers and the gear they’re selling to them. A lot of orders are placed from America’s bathrooms, they know, and they are unfazed by the sound of toilets flushing in the middle of a call. Likewise a line that suddenly goes dead when a boss walks into the office. Or a parent who breaks off to separate a child who has taken a hammer to the head of a sibling. You will never hear a Cabela’s employee say, “I don’t know.” Instead, they’ll say, “That’s a really good question,” and try to run the answer down. They can display any of the seventy-six camo patterns currently offered side by side and explain how they differ. On their computers, using what’s known as the Alpha System, they can call up product guides and information that are many times more detailed than what is on the website. If the CRA can’t answer the question, the caller is referred to the company’s product information specialists. These people are Cabela’s gurus, knowledgeable about big chunks of the 250,000 items offered at any time.

  One of them is JayDee Flohr, who works out of the Grand Island call center, about fifty miles from Kearney. He’s a big guy whose cubicle is adorned with a photo of the turkey he took last year with an Osage longbow. “I was walking into my ground blind when I heard him,” he says. “Never made it there.” Like all Cabela’s product specialists, he is a generalist, but counts himself particularly adept with trail cameras and other electronics, muzzleloading, and other traditional hunting gear. A customer wants to know if a spare-tire cover’s dimensions relate to the rim size or the tire size. Rim, Flohr tells him. Another needs to make sure the short-sleeved version of a shirt has the same two front patch pockets as the long-sleeved. It does. Somebody asking if a certain women’s New Balance athletic shoe has a removable insole prompts him to place the person on hold to consult with the specialist behind him, Mike Beltzer. “Mike is the shoe god,” says Flohr. Beltzer says the insole is removable. Flohr relays the information and takes an order. I notic
e Beltzer is wearing an unusual pair of basketball shoes and ask about them. “Vintage Air Jordans,” he tells me proudly. “Cherry condition. Probably worth a bundle on eBay.” Beltzer sold shoes for five years in Kansas and managed restaurants but didn’t need the aggravation. This is a job he doesn’t have to take home with him. His wife’s an accountant with the company. He does a lot of upland bird and turkey hunting.

  I listen in on a call Flohr gets about a Garmin 60CSx. The customer had bought the MetroGuide software and wants the more comprehensive City Navigator instead, plus he wants to replace the standard 64-megabyte chip with a 2-gig chip that Garmin customer service said he needs in order to download the whole program. Flohr checks and says that Cabela’s stocks the software but not the chip. The guy says he’ll check around and hangs up. Flohr shakes his head. “You could tell he was wanting to get off the phone. Otherwise I’d have told him those processors in his unit can’t really handle that huge card. Those units aren’t designed for that much load. It’ll work, but it’ll be real slow. He’d be better off if he would just download parts of it, but a lot of guys want to download the whole thing. It’s a judgment call, whether you tell them all that.” He shrugs. “And he seemed like he wanted what he wanted.”

  My Customer Disservice

  Flohr’s screen lights up with a call. A guy who just got a wood lathe is looking for a lure kit recommendation so he can start making his own. Barring that, he’d at least like the screws and eyelets to attach treble hooks to the bodies. “Guy can’t get a lathe without wanting to justify the expense,” the fellow jokes. “I’m not going into it in a big way, just like to be able to display some at craft shows and stuff.” Flohr looks in three specialty catalogs but can’t find the kit. “A lot of times, guys see it in Bass Pro Shops and call us instead,” he tells me while searching with the customer on hold. He tells the customer he can’t find it but knows what the fellow means. “I used to do the same thing,” Flohr says to the caller. “Give them away at Christmas and whatnot. I just bought screws at the hardware store.” The customer insists that his buddy bought little screws and plates to anchor the trebles to at Cabela’s. Flohr finally locates the items on page 41 of the Tackle Craft catalog. “I just flat-out missed them the first time,” Flohr admits. “Hook hangers, that’s what you want. And belly screws, round bibs, cup washers. We got ’em all.”