More thoughts on Customer Service

When people jump up and down for you, cater to your needs, pay attention to you, drop what they're doing to attend to you, now that's customer service!

Ever encounter one of these cashiers at Target or Home Depot? How they take their own sweet time to even look at you when you come up to their counter? And make it seem like they're doing you a favor by even talking to you. That's anti customer-service!

When a person makes you feel excited and welcome for doing business with them and even interacting with them (when you might not even buy anything from them at that moment), that's what brings customers back. It's the experience. Starbucks for example has gone beyond coffee and delivers the Starbucks experience.

The key is to underpromise and overdeliver. I manage a book of work and have clients who make requests for new features,  new data and bug fixes. One colleague who was previously managing the book of work is of the "create dev ticket -> prioritize -> develop" mentality. Sounds fair; sounds like the norm. However, he had created a ticket just for the sole purpose of removing a departed colleague's e-mail address from a configuration file. And then it had to be prioritized and assigned to someone else on the team. I was in disbelief! Removing an email address from a config file takes 30 seconds. Creating a ticket was a waste of time; and then assigning the ticket was a waste of time. He could have just edited the file and been done with it.

Looking for ways to put in the extra mile makes the difference between an average business and a superior business. I've made it my mission in business and in life to see where I can make a difference; where I can go that extra mile and make a client happy. As a manager I would do that extra 'mundane' work so that I can avoid giving it to a developer who wants to do some thing niftier. I have no problem with that. Management is about keeping people happy and satisfied so they continue to do a good job, after all.