We recently learned a hard lesson in customer service that may also be impacting your business.
We thought we were doing the right thing.
For 25 years we've lived by the traditional customer service mantra of "the customer is always right!"
You probably do too, don't you?
Yet, how many times have you ever stood in front of your complaining customer knowing they weren't "right?"
And, how many times did you give them what they wanted in the interest of fulfilling your claim of excellent customer service? When it was all over, did you feel good about yourself?
Chances are, you didn't!
You didn't feel good about yourself because you felt you compromised the standards of your business promise and the standards you offer your best customers.
Lowering your standards for a customer who doesn't understand or care about those standards is hurting your business because it's lowering the quality you can provide to your best customers.
As mentioned above, we recently learned this lesson the hard way, here's what happened...
A former client retained us for a new project.
During the discussion to re-engage us, we learned that on our last project several years ago, a former technician had made significant errors while on that job.
We were never told about them, this client just went away and stopped using us (another lesson for another day).
It wasn't known at the time but that technician was in the early stages of a serious illness that affected his performance and was the cause of those errors.
Upon re-engaging with this client for this new project we were grateful for the opportunity to serve this client again and wanted to begin rebuilding a high-trust customer relationship.
We were eager to please and make amends. Too eager.
We were so eager to please it caused us to adopt a "customer is always right" mentality that drove us to forget the time-tested standards and protocols, which have been the foundation of our success in solving client problems for over 25 years.
This led us to allow the client to ask us to perform work that did not follow our protocol.
The result...When the client's excavation was done, a small plastic pipe was broken, which would not have occurred had we followed our time-tested protocols and standards. Ones that have proved successful!
Fortunately, this turned out to be a relatively minor occurrence, BUT it could have been much more serious.
We learned a valuable lesson that has led to our new customer service mantra:
"Doing what is right for the customer is better than doing what the customer thinks is right!"
And, doing what is right is following our time-tested protocols and standards every time!!
The true path to customer service excellence builds mutual trust because it gets the best solutions for our clients, every time.
We think you will agree that the most rewarding and productive relationships are based on trust and not on transactions.
For that reason we will never again compromise quality to get or keep the sale.
As a result, our utility locating procedures that we had followed for over 20 years of daily practice in the field, albeit in a general way, were re-examined and then formally restructured to become our proprietary "10-Step Utility Locating Protocol™".
This "10-Step Utility Locating Protocol™" is followed for every client and every job, no exceptions!
And now the opportunity for you to benefit from a lesson learned the hard way...
Download our proprietary "10-Step Utility Locating Protocol™" and see what you can expect on your job site!
