I recently read an interview in Istoé magazine with Jan Garavaglia, a 53-year-old American doctor who has just published the book How Not to Die! The book grew out of her 20 years working as a medical examiner. She found that people often die for foolish reasons, including:
by: www.flickr.com/photos/kamshots/
- Accidents caused by talking on a cell phone while driving.
- High blood pressure, which is easily treatable, provided we get checkups to detect it.
- Rugs in elderly people’s homes, where a slip can be fatal, among other things you can read about in the article.
Now let’s return to the topic of this post: just as with fatal accidents, do we lose customers for reasons that could easily be avoided?
I’d like to share a few things that happened to me recently:
- I rented an apartment and found it in deplorable condition. I said I couldn’t stay there, but the building owner refused to return my deposit and said the problem was mine. Luckily, the real estate agent saw how I’d been wronged, and we reached an agreement in which he returned a fair portion of the money. I’ll be eternally grateful to that agent: he saw me first as a human being and, consequently, as a customer.
- I rented another apartment and received excellent service. The receptionist told me I’d receive the contract within a week, slipped under my door. Nearly the full rental period (one month) went by, and I had to go to the real estate office to get it.
- I ordered a bottle of brand X mineral water by phone, and the corner store sent brand Y. I accepted it so as not to be rude, but they made the same mistake a second time.
- I called a taxi service that makes intercity trips. The driver couldn’t take me that day but recommended another driver who could. The second driver called and said he’d call again when he got close to my neighborhood so I could give him landmarks. But he let the phone ring only once; the second time I answered, the call was collect, so I hung up immediately. Eventually he called normally and picked me up at the place I’d told him.
- I went into a store in a shopping mall, and a saleswoman asked me at least four or five times whether I wanted to sign up for the store’s credit card. Of course, she was paid to get more people to sign up, not to serve me well and give me what I needed.
To continue, I’ll share some points that Edmour Saiani identifies as essential in his book Ponto de Referência, which we can use as guidelines:
- Great customer service means offering the customer what they actually need.
- People should always come first, along with services that can be useful to them.
- Enjoy serving people and seeing the customer satisfied, rather than wanting money at any cost.
Another guideline is the set of timeless, unchanging principles we should live by to earn trust and face everyday challenges. I mentioned them in my post reviewing Reinventando você by Carlos Alberto Júlio:
Justice, courage, service, humility, integrity, human dignity, contribution, growth, empowerment, alignment of ideas, and creating value.
For the sake of simplicity, I’ll sum up all these values with the phrase enjoy serving. People who enjoy serving and are recognized for their actions surely have all these qualities and show them in their everyday lives. Enjoying service is a picture of one’s essence; it isn’t superficial.
Now let’s return to these situations and assess how serious they were:
- The first case is the most serious. The apartment was uninhabitable, and the owner, thinking only in the short term, lost a customer for life—and earned a source of negative publicity for life as well.
- In the second case, the receptionist created a whole dream of great service, then didn’t keep her promise, leaving me frustrated over something that could easily have been solved by delivering the contract where and when we had agreed. But she noticed the mistake and made it right without my saying anything, providing differentiated service by immediately solving an electricity problem I was having. She won me back.
- In the third case, the convenience store burned a customer over R$3.50, the price of the mineral water. It would have cost nothing to say they didn’t have it. The owner chose the “let’s see if we get away with it” approach. As a result, I easily went to another store that sold the brand of water I wanted.
- In the fourth case, it was clear that the taxi driver was trying to save money at all costs by making a collect call. This is probably the last trip I’ll take with him.
- In the fifth case, the woman wasn’t at fault. The company’s system forced her to meet targets that were very damaging to the company itself. I think that if I’m treated well, offered additional services, and won over by the company, I’ll naturally want to ask for its card. They’re putting the cart before the horse, and that causes problems in the long run.
Of course, these are very few cases (five examples), not a 20-year study like Jan Garavaglia conducted. So it’s impossible to give a definitive, conclusive answer. Perhaps in the future I’ll be able to get more detailed opinions from Edmour Saiani, Fred Alecrim (who’s part of the Ponto de Referência team in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte), or Carlos Alberto Júlio. :)
But what we can already see from these cases is that we can lose customers through carelessness and forgetfulness, as well as for more serious reasons rooted in human nature. In these five examples, most of the failures were serious, involving a lack of essential values such as honesty, commitment, respect, and professionalism. In short, what was missing was the enjoyment of serving others.
Even with so few cases, it’s possible to make good hiring choices. If I were an employer, I would hire:
- The woman who made minor mistakes but made up for them with useful service.
- The real estate agent who invited me to negotiate an outcome that would be fair to both of us, since he had also taken a loss.
- The woman who offered me the store card. I wouldn’t hire her right away, but I’d give her a chance, since the system she was required to follow was mostly to blame. If the system changed, she might change too, if that aligned with her nature.