Doing It Right

As this blog continues, anyone reading it is going to be treated to a large number of posts of me ranting about companies making customer service and product development or selection mistakes that a five-year-old child would know better than to permit. Not that this is intended to be a discussion of management incompetence; it’s just that these are two areas that are critical to the success of any business, and yet are the two areas most often totally ignored by senior management.

Customer service is a case in point. If you are dealing with a large corporation by telephone (as in the case of trying to make airline reservations, purchase something out of a catalog, or obtain technical support for a malfunctioning product) and the customer service representative (or CSR) is rude, unhelpful, or just stupid, you are likely to hang up and call a competitor (if one is available). The success or failure of the entire corporation can turn on the job performance of these personnel – who are, in many cases, the lowest-paid members of the company. Think about that for a moment. A company could easily lose thousands of dollars in sales just because a single employee making minimum wage fails to handle a call in a professional manner. Which can easily happen, considering that in many companies, the CSR will be paid the same wages regardless of how many transactions they are losing…

As we go along, I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunity to discuss specific cases of this sort of failure. Today, however, it gives me great pleasure to tell you about a company that is doing it right. Some years ago, I bought a leather swivel chair from Plummer’s Furniture, a chain of about a dozen stores located in California. Plummer’s sells some quite nice mid-range furniture at decent prices; better quality than say Ikea products, but less pricey than what you might find in some upscale stores. I’d purchased the chair from them because I’d had three of the Ikea versions break on me (or, more accurately, under me) in ten years, and I wanted something that would last a little longer.

Unfortunately, it didn’t. That is, my Plummer’s chair lasted nearly five years, instead of three and a half, but that’s not good value considering it was four times more expensive. When we took the broken chair apart to see if we could fix it, however, we discovered that the base (which had broken) had not been assembled correctly; instead of six large wood screws, the manufacturer had used three – and three small bolts that didn’t actually connect to anything. With less than half of its intended strength, the base had snapped.

I was a bit annoyed at this discovery, and took the broken base back to the Plummer’s location where I had purchased the chair. I didn’t really expect them to do anything about it (it had been over four years since the purchase, and any warranty would have long since expired), but I wanted to show them the problem anyway. To my surprise, the supervisor on duty that afternoon took down all of the information, including taking pictures of the base and the faulty manufacturing problem. She and her manager then contacted the manufacturer and got them to send me a replacement base.

As a result, I must say that my opinion about their entire operation has changed for the better. That I’m getting a replacement for the part that failed is nice; that I’m getting my favorite chair back makes me quite happy. But the reason I’m telling all of you about this is that they did it right. If the part required wasn’t made anymore; if the manufacturer had gone out of business in the interim because people got fed up with their shoddy construction methods; if they had tried their best to help me and been unable to, I would not be quite as happy, but I would still consider that the folks at Plummer’s had made the right call, done their best to take care of their customer, and probably kept a bad situation from turning into the permanent loss of a customer, plus the loss of everyone else I could tell this story to.

It’s a truism in customer service circles, but it still bears repeating: “If you take care of your customers, they will keep coming back; if you don’t, someone else will…”