A Second Chance

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”!

This is a story that is repeated in answering services all over the country. It’s about all of us.

Our sales rep made a great first impression on a potential client. (Let’s call him, Joe.) Joe’s current service could not keep their simple weekly on-call schedule straight and worse, they weren’t dispatching the calls quickly enough for Joe to keep his response commitment!

Joe trusted our sales rep and came with us.

 ----------  THEN --------

Everything that could go wrong did go wrong!

We set up the account and Joe and his staff began test calls.  He didn’t receive e-mail notification for two of the calls.  When Joe called our Customer Service rep, she was out on a family emergency. When she returned, our programmer was unavailable. After a   week’s delay, corrections were made to the account and testing resumed.

On the next test call, they noticed there was a 15-minute gap between when the call was received and when it was dispatched.  Once again, we were not able to get back to him quickly. 

At that point Joe spoke with the owner of our company. Our owner, believing we were SO much better than his recent experience, asked him to give us another chance. 

Joe was nice enough to grant that second chance.

We didn’t have another chance to make a FIRST impression – that first impression was gone, and it wasn’t good.  But we had a chance to show Joe that we COULD give him the excellent service we are known for!  We just had to work a little harder.

 Joe’s company is VERY GOOD at what they do, and they are focused on their customers.  He promises a ONE-hour response time when their equipment detects a breach.  Our quick dispatching of the message – to the right person – will make that happen, and is what will protect their reputation, their business relationships, and their bottom line.  It was up to us to make sure their customers got the help they needed when they needed it.

Joe WANTED our relationship to work.  He wanted to help us in any way he could, and he said, “If there is anything about the way our account is set up, or anything that makes you feel uninformed, we want to fix it!  Don’t be afraid to make suggestions.”

The bottom line is ----- When anyone in our industry has a second chance – we need to live up to our claims.  It’s a challenge.  Learn everything you can to be able to answer your customer’s calls intelligently.  Read through their profile.  Let management know if there is ANYTHING we could do to make the account more user friendly. And of course, let us know about any compliments you get, because I suspect you are going to make your client very happy.

 

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