Business Development

Worst. Customer. Service. Ever.

This is an email I got yesterday from AT&T, who provides my cell service and my long-distance service. I'm not going to quote it in its entirety -- this is enough:

"You are requested to submit the balance of $0.00.  Without payment in full by the due date, your access to all AT&T services billed under this account number may be interrupted.  To avoid any service disruption, please pay the balance due by logging into  AT&T BusinessDirect(sm) at https://www.att.com/loginnow and accessing "Pay your Bills"."

You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on branding, marketing, advertising and all kinds of cheesy messages about how much you love your customers, complete with appropriately multiethnic models (black women with very light skin tones seem to be a big favorite these days) but doing something like this just makes it all a big waste of money. Yes, we are dealing here with a huge, indifferent, lumbering, badly run company, who, when the day is over, are not particularly bothered by the idiocy of sending a customer a threatening email demanding payment of nothing.

And, of course, it's going to be my job to get on the phone with these idiots and straighten it all out. Because I have nothing better to do.

Grr.

Which Clients to Fire

One of the bedrock principles of marketing, particularly database-driven marketing analytics, which I won't get into here but is fascinating, is that 20% of your clients make you 80% of your money. This is also known as the Pareto Principle, or the 80/20 Rule. The conclusion it compels is that there are always clients you need to do a better job of servicing, and clients you really ought to get rid of. The devil being in the details, as he is, the question then arises -- which is which?

 

If you're Best Buy, the clients who make the vast majority of your profits are the ones who regularly buy expensive, big-ticket items, never return anything, ignore sales, always buy the service plan, and never need or want customer service. The ones who make you no money, or even lose you money, are the ones who are just the opposite -- buy cheap stuff with little or no margin, return things, need a lot of hand-holding and rebates, and so on.

Typically, you can do sort of the same analysis with professional services clients, but the rules are different. In particular, there are a lot of "what-ifs" around these clients that are hard to quantify. What kind of business you've done with them in the past doesn't necessarily dictate what kind of business you could potentially do with them in the future.

Over at her blog Golden Practices, Michelle Golden has recently put up a link to an article she's written that discusses how to evaluate clients more objectively, and take some of the mushiness out of thinking about who you really want to court, and who you really can do without. Take a look -- it's a nice example of thinking a little harder about things, with impressive results.

Let's Make It Right

About a week ago, I had to move some furniture. This project involved driving all over the Bay Area -- to Oakland, to a neighbor, and to another neighbor – to pick up a load of furniture which then had to be moved into an apartment. I needed to rent a truck. So I went to U‑Haul.

Renting the truck itself was easy enough. Along with a high school kid (one of my personal rules for navigating middle age is to use high school kids whenever possible – for instance, if you are having a birthday party for a bunch of 6‑year-olds, hiring two or three high school girls to help makes it infinitely easier and can actually make it pleasant) I lifted and pushed and cursed and sweated my way through the day.

At the end of the day, it was time to return the truck to U‑Haul. The deadline was 7:00 p.m. I arrived with the truck literally at 7:02. I drove into the parking lot, which was still open, stopped the truck, got out, and was met by a U‑Haul employee. It didn’t look good.

This employee, who had his arms folded, told me that because it was 7:02, all the computers in the store (which was still filled with working U‑Haul employees) had been shut down, they could not process my return of the truck, and furthermore, I would have to take the truck out of the lot and park it on the street overnight. U‑Haul would then retrieve the truck in the morning, drive it onto the lot (to the exact spot where it now stood) and then it would be officially "returned". I would have to pay for an additional day of rental.

I had no choice. I did as he commanded. I then wrote a fairly nasty email to U‑Haul's customer service , expressing my annoyance (to put it politely) at this entire sequence of events.

Right after clicking the "send" button on the web site, I received a machine-generated letter thanking me for my email and telling me they would get back to me.

Today, they did. Granted, it was over a week since the original incident, but today I received not one, but two telephone calls from the manager of the U‑Haul store where I had rented my truck. He apologized repeatedly, he offered me a 50 percent discount on my next rental with U‑Haul, he explained that his predecessor had been fired for similar customer service atrocities, and all in all, he made me aware that he regretted the incident, and would take steps to ensure it never happened again.

Whether or not it ever happens again is not the point. The amount of money the manager offered me in recompense for my inconvenience is not the point. The delay between the incident and the phone call is not the point. Then what, is the point? 

The point is, that in dealing with clients, in many situations, what matters is not the magnitude or nature of the mistake, but the firm's response to the mistake. It does not matter how much of a mess you make, it matters how sincere you are about cleaning it up, and how quickly you attempt to do it. Often, you cannot only repair a relationship, but you can strengthen it. 

I am still not thrilled with U‑Haul. However, I am no longer angry with them, and would definitely consider renting from them again. All because of the way they responded to the mistake – not the mistake itself.