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If You Can Do It, Do It

January 3, 2019 By The Rhythm Of Reman Leave a comment


The dual Christmas and New Years holidays serendipitously fell on two consecutive Monday and Tuesdays. This meant: 4 day weekends, slow work weeks, and lots of time to celebrate and relax with my family. For the first time since my maternity leave, I had a lot of quality time on my hands with my son. Email notifications were off, all of my colleagues were either keeping it easy or working on personal projects which did not require me thank you very much, and all was quiet on the home front.
Boop.
A Facebook message. Owner, marketing manager, associate – no matter who monitors your social media accounts, you know that people choose all times of day or night to contact, celebrate, complain, or review your business.
Boop. It was Friday evening at 7:59 PM when I got the first message from, let’s call him Joe. Before I knew a little more about Joe and his situation, I thought, why, why now? Friday evening after business hours before a holiday – not the best possible time to reach out to a business. I’ll admit it: I was annoyed.
The part of me working on ever-improving work-life balance thought that I should only get back to Joe if it seemed urgent. I’m on vacation! The correct part of me realized that the price of great customer service is doing the right thing for your customer even if it’s just a little inconvenient for you – even if it’s a lot inconvenient for you.
Joe had an easy enough question: “What is your typical turnaround time for a replacement unit?”
I had an easy enough answer: “It depends.” I elaborated.
Joe quickly revealed why he was asking. His wife, kids, and grandkids were stuck a mere 100 miles from our HQ where the transmission in the family’s truck had gone out over the holidays. The family was essentially stranded. With in-laws. After Christmas… through New Year’s. They brought it to a shop, the shop called us, ordered the unit, and we had bad news: the transmission wouldn’t be there until 2019… until a bit into 2019.
$h!t.
While I was taking screenshots of our messages for an email to the team, I got simultaneously texted from Captain Reman and The Soigneur of Support who also saw what Joe’s family was experiencing. We swiftly entered into triage.
Noah asked questions. I asked Joe and informed him we wouldn’t sit idly by and accept the direness of the circumstances before him. Ben was looking up account information, trying to find the claim number, the shop details, and what exactly was said on the phone. We did all this from our respective homes. I was feeding 7 month old his first meal of peas and oatmeal, a shotty one-handed affair, texting Joe, and trying to be present and responsive for both activities.
It turns out Joe, his replacement unit, his wife, kids, and grandkids, were victim of the worst possible scenario: we didn’t have the unit in stock and would ship it after the New Year when our production staff would return from the holiday and the carriers were running again.
Joe and I chatted for a few days. I gave him his claim number. I got his phone number. I assured him we were trying to figure this out, make it right. I figured out where his family was staying and sent them a very hefty Italian lunch as a mea culpa. Joe asked me to clarify some details of our warranty, and I did so while knowing the more time that went by while his family was stuck a thousand miles from him the angrier he’d be about every element of his customer experience. Meanwhile, the text triangle continued between myself, Noah, and Ben, determining when/if we could get a unit (by bus, car, plane, Superman!) to Joe’s family before the date he was given. We connected dots, determined where we should go above and beyond for this epic holiday inconvenience. Ben called Joe. Ben called the shop. Ben called the original shop just to update them as well. It was New Years Eve. Happy New Year, Joe.
In the grand scheme of work-life balance, this wasn’t a sterling example of Mom-Andee being in high gear, ignoring the small work problems of the transmission marketing world. But, so what? I texted a little. Ordered food on Grub Hub. Texted some more. Looked up an account on my laptop – the point: it didn’t put me out, and I hope it was just a little, teensy, tiny bit evident that we were going to bat to Joe all the long weekend, all through the holiday, doing what we could from our views of kids, family, maybe some champagne, and without the physical or technical ability to build, dyno, and deliver a unit to them our damn selves.
Ben drove the unit down to Illinois himself to deliver it to the shop for installation. He did because he could, and it saved at least a day on a too-many-day process already. From there it was out of our hands.
Sometimes, the boops can wait. Sometimes they should wait. There are people on both ends of the text transmission – a potentially angry customer looking to be heard somewhere in the country or a marketing professional managing accounts who had little to nothing to do with the customer experience up until that very point. If you can help, help.
 


The Rhythm of Reman was looking forward to not working over the holiday weekend. When the phone started beeping though, she remembered it doesn’t cost much to help someone who could use a few moments of your time. Comment below or connect with Andee directly.

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