Outservicing Your Competition - By Don Farrell

What about a phone call to the phone company of all places (phone = phone company) to ask a question about your billing or to change your service? Is it just me, or are you also bothered by the automatic attendant asking you to type in your complete phone number, including area code, and when you finally reach someone they ask you what your number is? Well, I have a surprise for you today readers...I have a good story for once. Yes, something so refreshing that I decided to write a blog about this simple, yet totally effective approach to customer service.

Here goes. I am going to be speaking for almost a full day at an annual conference for a pretty cool hotel management company in about a month. Doing my best to walk my talk I find out that the assistant to the Sr VP of Operations has recorded her own CD's. Now I normally bring a memory stick with about 100 songs on them that I will have playing as the meeting room fills up, during coffee breaks and certainly at the end when they are filling out an evaluation on the experience they just had in participating in one of my workshops.

Side note here....when I play 'What a Wonderful World' by Louis Armstrong and thank each attendee by individually shaking each and everyone's hand while they fill out the evaluation, I know I get goose bumps and the vibe I get back from them tells me that they think it is pretty cool too. Does playing Louis' song help to get higher evaluations, I can't say that I have empirical evidence to prove that I do...but I do believe that their last impression of their time spent with me is a reinforced positive one.

So back to my music selection for this training/speaking event...I think how sweet would it be to surprise this assistant to the SR VP of Ops by playing one or more of her songs during one of the breaks. How many of her fellow employees know that she sings...I will soon find out because they all will hear it from me. So I Google her name and sure enough there she is with a couple of CD options. The name of the order fulfillment company is called CD Baby...an independent music distributor. I buy the CD online and within minutes I get the following e-mail addressed from 'CD Baby Loves You':

Don-

Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, October 7, 2009.
We hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. In commemoration, we have placed your picture on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Sigh...
We miss you already. We'll be right here at http://cdbaby.com/, patiently awaiting your return.
--
CD Baby
The little store with the best new independent music.
http://cdbaby.com cdbaby@cdbaby.com (503)595-3000


Now tell me that this isn't the coolest little note that you ever saw...especially when all you are expecting is a standard (hate that word) confirmation note of some sort with a legal disclaimer attached to it that is longer than the message.

This brings to mind an exercise that we undertook at my training company where I was bent on making every customer contact we had as memorable as this note from CD Baby. We looked at our agreements and made them more user friendly, positive and fun to read. With our billing statements we included balloons (not filled up), crayons and confetti when they opened the invoice statement. Everything that touched our exterior and interior customers was looked at with a critical marketing and service eye. How can we....that means you...do a better job of separating ourselves by elevating even the most mundane of processes to make it special for our customers? When you tackle this one, with your complete staff, you will have a lot of fun and come up with unique ideas that will make you stand out like CD Baby did for me.


About Fresh Revenues

Fresh Revenues is a company dedicated to increasing revenues and delivering results through high impact speaking engagements, interactive and uber-energy workshops and true partnership consulting.

Logos, product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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