How An Evangelist Saved Our Bacon

As a manager, I would love to say I only hear the good feedback but it’s a pretty good mix of the good and bad.  I think we’ve established on our blog thus far that bad feedback is in many ways more useful than good feedback but that doesn’t make it my favorite.  Pardon my honesty.

Oftentimes, when an angry customer makes it to me, they are half way out the door and actively searching for other companies to do business with.  At that point, I win some and lose some.  I had a new experience over the last week though.  I had such a customer that was extremely frustrated and frankly done troubleshooting with us.  I spent some time working with her IT guy to troubleshoot the problem and left it where she would call me back the next day and discuss further if she was going to continue on with our company.

The next day, she called me and said that she actually called her friend who originally referred her to our company and her friend helped her fix the issue!  I can tell you, that is not how I envisioned us resolving the issue.  In this case however, we dodged a bullet thanks to a savvy customer who was able to quickly assist their friend.

I learned a valuable lesson here.  A great product with great support and well trained customers can create evangelists for the product who will be there as a resource to anyone they refer to the product.  I think you call this a customer community.  Along these same lines, I have seen customers interact with and sometime resolve issues for other customers on our Facebook page without any prompting from someone on our staff.

Think about this next time you take ownership of a customer and make their day.  You are potentially recruiting and training evangelists for your company.  In case you were wondering, evangelists are really, really good.  The more you get, the better! No this does not absolve us from the responsibility to improve but I’m certainly thankful for the evangelist that saved our bacon this time.