Learning To Say Yes!

I’m currently reading Kenneth Blanchard’s book, “Raving Fans” with my fellow Phone.com book clubbers. Toward the beginning of the book, the narrator describes two different stores and the customer service they provide. At the first store he finds that they are out of stock of a book he would like to purchase. However, this doesn’t stop a store employee from locating a copy of the book at another store, purchasing it, gift-wrapping it and delivering it to the customer at the price they would have paid had it been in stock.

Instead of allowing the customer to walk away empty-handed, the store went above and beyond in satisfying the customer’s needs. This makes me think of the movie “Yes Man”. How often do we look at a customer’s situation or needs and say, “Nope sorry, no can do” or “Unfortunately, there’s just no other way?” It’s convenient to take the easy road and say no, but taking the path less traveled and saying yes will WOW a customer.

Our actions define the service that we provide and I know for myself I desire to become a “Yes” customer service representative.For example, Phone.com recently ran into an error with a customer’s online fax. This particular customer needed to send his document ASAP. While we created a ticket for our engineering team to fix the issue we went the extra step and faxed the customer’s document for him.  Sending faxes for customers is not a normal procedure however, when he asked if we could send it for him we said, “Yes”. By saying yes the customer’s irritation over the product not working dissipated.

[custom_author=danielle]