Brian Feener

Flossing is generally considered a good thing for everybody. It promotes good gum health and my dentist always tells me that I need to do it more.

So what is the business application of this idea? I think it may just be good customer service.

• It’s a hard habit to get into, an easy one to keep doing.
• Small actions go a long way.
• It should be daily. Not just when you want to.
• The short term effects aren’t always palpable.
• The long term effects are always palpable.
• Both are covered in wax. (Ok… so maybe all of these don’t work perfect.)

Add your thoughts and ideas in the comments. What is the flossing of business?

[image CC from pjmorse]

(For anyone who is trying to get to this site through the main Brian Feener.com link - you can’t read this anyways. But my lucky Wordpress people can! We’ll talk to them… help is apparently on the way.)

Yesterday, I had registered a hosting plan to go with my domain name at GoDaddy. Stupid me - I ended up setting up a second account, so things weren’t getting linked together. So I called up customer service, and in less than 10 minutes, I had the issue resolved. Great!

Cut to 24 hours later when I’m trying to load my files into the site. It didn’t work and after 12 hours of waiting for things to load up, I decided to call customer service again.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the representative Destry and I went through about 10 possible solutions before he said “I have no idea what’s happening here.” I then mentioned that I had merged the account less than 24 hours ago. “Oh!” he said. “Then let’s check the IP address!” Sure enough, things weren’t pointing in the right direction. In less than 5 minutes, the problem is (apparently) solved.

Destry and I wasted 40 minutes of talk time because GoDaddy had not taken the steps to log my activity. A simple log would have shown that I had called up yesterday and made a change to my account. A simple log would have shown that I had talked to Sergio yesterday. A simple log would have made my day easier, Destry’s day easier, and GoDaddy’s pockets full of the $4.00 it took to handle my call.

$4.00 not a big deal, except that it is about a full month of my hosting plan, and times 1,000 customers, it becomes a big deal.

This proves that the more you work on the back-end of a problem, the more you think a step ahead of your customer, the more you anticipate possible scenarios, the better you are prepared to be remarkable. It’s harder this way, but it’s worth it. Business is chess, not checkers.

Understanding who your customer is makes you 1 percent more likely to make them happy.

Actually using that understanding to make customer service policy makes you 1 trillion percent more likely to make them happy.

Unless you are making sales to robots, you cannot speak to someone like they are a robot.  Just because you “live in a digital world,” your customer doesn’t.  They are calling on real telephones, writing real emails, having real frustrations, and having real emotions.

Customers have feelings too.