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When working with service-based companies like us, there are two important factors that shape your experience with us. These two ideas are probably thought about more in our personal lives, but they are just as applicable in business. The quality of the service you receive depends on how well we deliver on these two points.
Integrity
The simplest definition is doing what you say you’re going to do. Your words and actions match up completely. Relationships in your personal life will thrive if people can bank on your word. Likewise, your business will thrive if people can count on your business to do what it says it’s gonna do. At Paramore|Redd, one of our mantras is to deliver every point of every proposal, no matter what. If we promise it, we deliver it.
Expectations
When you’re dating someone new, inevitably you have a DTR (defining the relationship) conversation. What this does is set expectations and boundaries in your relationship. At P|R, it’s just as important that we have a DTR of sorts with our clients to set expectations and boundaries. Proposals set expectations like the scope and price of a project. Production schedules also set expectations like project milestones and key deliverables.
Integrity and expectations go hand in hand. They reinforce each other, and if one fails, the other one is damaged too.
Two recent examples - one bad, one good - when I was the customer:
Example 1: I had to get two new tires put on my car the other weekend, and the tire shop (cough…NTB…cough) told me that my wait time was 45 minutes to an hour. I could live with that. One hour came and went. No car. No update. I asked for an update a few minutes later but got nothing. Total time to put two new tires on my car: two and a half hours! They overshot their estimate by 90 minutes (and on a Saturday, no less). If they would’ve told me two and a half hours upfront, I could’ve at least made an informed decision about whether to wait or not. I left dissatisfied. I’m not going back there, and I won’t ever send my friends there either.
Example 2: I traveled out of the country for a vacation last month. Upon checking in at the resort, the bellhop showed us to our room. He mentioned that the hot water could take up to 3 minutes to get warm. It was a small statement that completely neutralized any potential dissatisfaction I could have had waiting for the water to heat up. For the rest of the week, I had no problem waiting because my expectation had been set at the beginning. Had he not made that small statement, I know I would’ve been annoyed waiting for the water to heat up. But it was no big deal. Great service sets expectations up front.
Having integrity and setting expectations are vital to great customer service.
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Well said Mark! There’s nothing more frustrating than a company lacks integrity or doesn’t set (and stick to) expectations.
And here’s a great article about what happens when companies don’t deliver - http://www.copyblogger.com/copy-conversion/
Trustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons to kill the troll.
If everyone would say what they mean and mean what they say life in general would be so much better. My question: why is that so hard???