I'm going to take a minute to toot my own horn. Not so much for the sake of "tooting," but just to give a few simple examples of what I think is REMARKABLE service.
I am such a big follower of Seth Godin, both his blog and his books. Boundaries are removed when I listen or read his work. Anyway, the more I absorb, the more I become aware of opportunities to exceed customers' expectations. But not only that, my staff sees my intentions and begins to do the same. And the object, as a leader, is to reward those extraordinary efforts until it becomes the culture associated with your company or brand. So I point out a couple of examples that occurred yesterday in my office.
Example A: Lady looking for directions. We had a lady walk in looking for the UPS or FedEx office to mail a package. We don't have a FedEx office and the UPS office is very difficult to find. So my customer service person did several things to help:
- Looked up the phone number and called to make sure UPS was open since it was President's Day.
- Found the street address and went to Google maps.
- Printed out the Google map.
- Highlighted the route from "You are here" to the UPS location.
This lady was not from around here. How she ended up at my printshop, I have no idea. We didn't make a dime of this and actually lost money based on time spent. But…that lady knows somebody in Kinston and I bet you she talks about the REMARKABLE service she received at Advantage Printing.
Example B: Man needing business cards. Doing business as usual, we provided a card proof. The customer wasn't quite satisfied with the colors and quality of card stock. Part of the problem was that he did not provide any original artwork and we had to "scan" an old business card. But, of course, a customer doesn't want to hear it was "his" fault and doesn't really care about our "technical" problems. But on top of that, he wanted a "thicker" stock than our press can run in house. So I got involved and we asked him to give us one hour to provide a solution. My graphic artist reworked the scanned file for an additional charge to solve "technical" problem one. We got a quote from an outside trade printer we use to print the thicker stock cards to solve problem two. We added UV coating which customer wasn't expecting. I called the customer back, told him what we had done and gave him a new quote.
Value: The new quote was higher than his original quote, but I added Value. Since a business card is your personal billboard and, many times, the first impression, he would now have a business card to be proud of.
Remarkable: Then it was time to WOW him. Since deliver of his business cards would now be delayed with the changes, he could now participate in our Business cards for LIFE program. If he wanted to pay the quoted price + $10.00, all of his future business cards would be FREE for LIFE. Now an ordinary business card sale and customer service issue just became Remarkable.
So I did toot my own horn. But please toot yours too. I would love to hear how your small business is being REMARKABLE.
