CUSTOMER SERVICE SHOULDN'T BE AN OXYMORON

BY: Michael A. Aun, FIC, LUTCF, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame

When I lived in South Carolina, I had to find a new grocery store when my uncles Arthur and Eli Mack retired and closed Mack's Cash and Carry…

The store I selected shall go unnamed but it appropriately rhymes with "ogre." In those days, I'd pile my twin sons Cory and Jason into the pickup and we'd head into town to grocery shop. We usually bought a minimum of three shopping carts full of groceries so we didn't have to make the trip but a couple times per month.

We didn't shop so much as we swooped, pouncing on dozens of cans of such delectable items as speghetios, a primary menu item in a house with small kids. Grocery shopping was right up there with chewing tin foil for me; I'd rather milk a cobra.

One afternoon, Cory, Jason and I had just run up a $450 tab and were checking out our three shopping carts of groceries. I got home and started unloading and realized I was missing a six-pack of diet Pepsi drinks. I called the store that rhymes with "ogre" and got the manager. I explained my dilemma. He said "hold on" and disappeared for five minutes, checking with the irrefutable fountain of knowledge (the bag boy) who testified that he saw "the fat guy" drive out with the six-pack of drinks in the back of his pickup.

Let's stop the frame for a moment. If I were going to try to rip off "ogre," wouldn't I have gone for the fillet steaks? Why pick a $1.79 six-pack of cola. Long story short… the manager came back on and said "the bag boy says you got your drinks….. bub."

"Bub" is a name I don't normally answer to…. "Bubba" perhaps, but never "Bub."

So the next day I called his boss and explained my problem. His superior understood the customer service rules. There are only two of them. Rule number one: The customer is always right. Rule number two: See rule number one. It ain't rocket science.

"Sorry that happened," he explained. "I'll tell the store to give you a six-pack next time you're in."

It happened that I was giving a speech to an "ogre" convention in French Lick, Indiana the next week. I bragged about how the Lexington, SC store fixed my problem and about the customer service. It was a terrific war story that I may have even embellished a bit.

Two weeks later the check from "ogre" had cleared and we're the store swooping again. This time I'm checking out some $650 of groceries (get over it… we eat a lot). I went to my favorite checkout lady who was a neighbor of ours and explained the diet Pepsi thing. "Yeah, I heard about that." Then she said something that concerned me. "Let me go check with the manager."

The manager came down from on high. They always keep them up in those one-way glass booths to see who is stealing candy and such. His opening statement was "Yeah, I remember you… you're the guy who tried to rip off a six-pack of drinks last time you were in here."

Obviously he had not gotten the message from his boss about replacing my drinks. So I suggested that he call his superior and get this straight once and for all. He was screwing up my terrific war story that I had told the French Lick group two weeks prior. "I'm not bothering my manager at this hour of the day."

"It's only 5:00 p.m.," I said. "He's probably not even home yet."

"I'm not bothering him with this nonsense. If you don't like our service, you can shop some place else."

Deflated and beaten down, I got home that evening and hit the button on Quicken to see what we had spent on groceries that year. It was over ten grand, which blew my mind. That's not counting the items that you grab on the way home for which you pay cash.

Speaker Hall of Fame management guru Tom Peters, CPAE once said for every one customer you tick off and run off it cost you 10 to 15 times the amount of money to replace that customer. It just cost "ogre" over $100,000 because I have never shopped there again… and I speak a hundred times a year on customer service. Go ahead… make my day.

I was sharing this story in Orlando with an audience of newspaper publishers later that year when a prominent national "Journal" decided to write the story up as a feature column.

After the column appeared, I showed up the next day to my office and there were six cases of every kind of diet drink that has ever been created sitting on the front steps of my office with a note of apology.

Too little… too late. Customer service shouldn't be an oxymoron.