Tag Archives: Customer service

February 6, 2015 · 12:03 pm

A Lesson From Big Al

Foodie Friday, and our food fun this week comes from a restaurant in which I’ve never eaten but of which I am a customer. A very happy customer, actually, and my happiness is all due to an excellent lesson in customer care.

Big Al’s BBQ & Catering is located in Raleigh. As Al’s website proclaims:

We aren’t the cheapest Carolina BBQ vendor, but we guarantee freshness and award-winning flavors you can’t find anywhere. Period. Come eat with us, or call in and order out! We’ll pack your plate just fine.

Honestly, I’ve not done that. What I have done is to order merchandise from him. You see, my Dad is also called Big Al and I thought it would be a fun surprise to send him a shirt and a hat bearing the Big Al name and logo.  I placed an online order and entered my parents’ address for shipping.  After a week when I hadn’t received an excited call from Florida I began to wonder about the status of my order.  It was then that I noticed the receipt said “local pickup” meaning they were waiting for me to walk into their store and grab the goods.

I emailed the address from which the receipt came explaining that there had been a mix-up.  Within 20 minutes I had a note back from Al himself explaining that he had tried to text me (I had used a land line on the order) to ask about shirt color and was glad I had sent the note.  Here is where the lesson begins.

A quick exchange of emails to furnish the correct shipping address concluded with Al saying “I’ll get that out to you.”  No long explanation, no haggling over if the error was on my end or on his.  Just “I’ll get that out to you. ”  This morning, I received a text – “Going to ship your Dad’s package this morning priority mail…I am picking up the freight for all your troubles.”

If you take one thing away from the roughly 1,700 screeds I’ve written I hope it’s the rock-solid focus on the customer Al demonstrated.  Heck, I’m some schlub from out-of-state that ordered a shirt and hat.  I’m not going to be coming in weekly for food.  Al treated me as I assume he does everyone – with respect, an assumption that the customer is right, and a willingness to go the extra mile.

If you are ever near Raleigh I hope you’ll hit Big Al’s for a meal.  Order out if you can.  Tell your friends to go. Even if you have other dining plans, do me a favor and swing by and let him know you admire his customer-centric focus.  I sure do. I wonder if he can ship ribs to Connecticut?

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December 31, 2014 · 12:55 pm

Top Posts Of The Year 2014 – #1!

This was the most-read post I wrote in 2014.  It is about one of the favorite topics here on the screed: customer service.  This one was a pleasure to write as was the experience upon which it was based.  It was originally called “Service Done Right,” and that’s something I hope the screed continues to provide for you.  Happy New Year!

I go on an annual golf trip – no shock given that golf is a frequent topic here on the screed. This year’s takes place in a few weeks and part of our group’s tradition (it’s our twentieth trip!) is that each guy brings “free stuff” for every other guy. Of course, it’s never free to the giver, but that’s part of the charm, I guess.

Over the years I’ve made a variety of commemorative T-shirts for the group as my gift and I’ll be doing that again this year (sorry if I ruined the surprise for any of my group that visits here). I designed them and sent the file off with my order to Design-A-Shirt, the company I’ve used several times before. What happened next is customer service at its finest.

First, when they began working on the order, they sent out proof sheets to show me how they had cleaned up what I sent them and to get an approval to proceed.  This is the first step in very smart customer service.  After all, why take the chance on an unhappy customer (bad) or on having to redo an order (worse, and a killer of margins)?  This was NOT a form email.  It came from a person and I responded to a personal mailbox as I approved what they were doing.

To this point, I’d call this above average, smart customer communication.  Here is where it gets extraordinary.  I got this note yesterday:

Hello Keith,

I wanted to follow up on the order you placed with us to provide you with a production photo of your design printed on fabric. Please see the attached photo for reference. We are concerned about the text… as it’s a bit hard to read. To fix that we would either have to move the “ball” up to make the font larger, or use a different, thinner font that would be more legible. Please advise!

Wow.  They printed the approved design on T-shirt fabric and had a human give it the once over.  That same human took the time to write me a personal note and to ask for guidance.  I should remind you that this is for 13 shirts and the total cost was around $150, far from a big order.  Even so, they made me feel as if I was ordering 13 dozen.  Giving equal attention to every customer is part of doing it right.  Not surprisingly, late last night I got an email that the order had shipped and will be here at the end of the week – several days ahead of when it was promised.

Think I’ll be back?  You bet.  More importantly, by using them as an example of perfect customer communication and service – that which goes above and beyond the customer’s expectations – I’m hoping you’ll both learn from them and given them consideration if you need to make a shirt or two.  I know I talk often in this space about how excellent customer service costs less than you think and retaining a customer is always easier than finding a new one.  Hopefully this real word example resonates.  Does it?

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November 18, 2014 · 12:23 pm

What Business Hours?

I tried to pay my health insurance premium on Saturday. Even though I have a 31 day grace period, I’m always prompt about sending it in on the due date since I don’t want a sniffle to turn into pneumonia which rapidly becomes bankruptcy.

I’ve been paying the bill online for a year. It’s a pretty easy system. Input the account number, input the invoice number, tell them if you want the money taken from a bank or a credit card and you’re good to go. This time, not so much. With the invoice in my hand I was told the system could not find my information. Oh sure – they knew the group number existed, but not the invoice. Hmm. Maybe using the telephone payment system?

Same result. The automated system couldn’t find my invoice either. No problem. Heck, it’s late morning on a Saturday – let’s call customer service and speak with a human. Um – no. Not until 8am Monday. I guess it hasn’t dawned on this company that people who are at work during the week might like to have an opportunity to speak to customer service when they have an hour to wait on hold and do their business.

So promptly at 8 Monday morning I called. I got right through to an agent who found my invoice without an issue and took my payment. As it turned out their system had a database issue over the weekend which is why it couldn’t process any payments.  Which prompted a couple of thoughts.

If you have critical systems you need to have monitors in place which alert you to failure.  Any web-based client who owns servers has some sort of alert in place to tell them if something is down.  Even more have alerts in place to tell them if something is running slowly, if a DDoS attack is happening, or if any number of other events occur that affects site performance and, therefore, their business.  In this case, the company could not take in revenue.  That’s pretty important.

Doing business when YOU want and not when your customer is ready is so last century.  I realize that implementing automated systems to facilitate that during non-business hours is what the company was doing but failing to monitor and maintain those systems is the same as not having them.  Actually, it may be even worse since it frustrates your customers.

The concept of “business hours” is dead.  Your business is open 24/7.  Maybe it’s just your mind that’s closed?

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