Defining moments

One sentence can turn a customer into a promoter or a detractor. With one sentence you may let him know that you care about him. But with one sentence you may also let him know that you are not interested in his questions. One sentence can be a defining moment.

Recently I got an angry feedback from a customer who had been searching for the right contact in our huge company for quite a while. He told me that one of the other customer service teams asked him to check where he had ordered and then to call that customer service team. Well, this customer works in an university with a central purchasing deprtment and he had no clue where the purchasers had ordered. He just knew that the product was produced by our company and that we had a myriad of different customer service phone numbers.

This was a defining moment. I was lucky that this customer was still willing to give feedback and to talk to me and together with our amazing customer advocate I made sure that his complaint has visibility in senior management. We also made the suggestion that we should have a database of all our customer service and technical support teams on the high level company internet sites so that customers can search for the right contacts.

When I told him about our actions he was truly impressed and I am sure that he will not walk away as he had planned to. He now has my name and e-mail address and I asked him to contact me any time he felt lost in our company so that I could look if I could help him.