What Would Your Customers Say About You?

This past weekend, I received two very different levels of service from two different pizza places. The amount spent was about the same (about $30 in each case). In the first case, the pizza was ordered on a Friday evening, a pickup time was promised and verified when I got to pickup the pizza (I was a bit early)…and the time came and went. The service promise, as I saw it, was broken. It ended up taking 45 minutes for 3 pizzas from a national chain. (It was promised in 25 minutes.)  In the second case, it was a Saturday evening just after a large concert let out nearby, so I ordered from a different pizza chain (I was in a different city)—fearing the worst. The pizza was promised to be delivered in 30 minutes. In 25 minutes, the phone rang—the pizza was ready for us to pickup in the lobby of the hotel we were at. In both cases, pizzas were hot and fresh, but the experience was very different.

 

At work, I was tasked to call our customers to see what they think of the product we’re selling and the service from our company. While most were positive, some weren’t, and I listened and wrote down both positive and negative feedback. I was able to react to the negative feedback and, as a result, some business was generated from my efforts to change the way we do business. These external customers gave me terrific feedback, and I’m thankful.

 

The most-overlooked customers are internal customers. Internal customers can be our coworkers, our families, people on the same sports team, etc—anyone who depends on us. How often have we each come home and taken out our work day on those at home, or placed our needs in front of others at home? While the short-term results are easy to see, long-term results may be a loss of teamwork at work, decreased affection from your spouse/kids, and similar detriments in other areas. Many people won’t tell us what minor things we’ve done wrong—they’ll just avoid asking for a favor in the future. Over time, the “snowball effect” takes place.

 

The moral of today’s blog: beware not only of what you say and do, but what impression you give others. All pizzas are not created equal.

Onward.