By Dick Stark

“I believe that the level of priority and the amount of passion and emphasis that must be put towards the customer experience must be, in a word, unreasonable.  It must be excessive.  It must go beyond the limits of common sense.  It must be extreme, irrational and out of proportion with what your competitors are doing. It cannot be anything less than remarkable.”

–Joe Mechlinski, Grow Regardless

Customer satisfaction, or “every customer a reference,” is a RightStar customer motto and a critical success factor for RightStar.  What type of unreasonable customer service stories do we have?  When I visited BMC in Tampa, their Director of Technical and Customer Support, told us a story about a large customer we both share. He said that they ran out of disk space recently when working AssetCore.  Without flinching, BMC ordered new servers and expressed shipped them to the customer for free.

Several years ago, we did something similar for a ScanStar customer. Once we began the project, we discovered that their scanners were not compatible with ScanStar. This was surprising since we make it a point to ensure that all ScanStar customers receive our list of certified scanners. Rather than argue about who was right, we rushed five new scanners to them overnight at no cost. This guaranteed an on-time delivery and a very satisfied customer.

Likewise, our consultants are often faced with situations where a BMC defect has slowed our implementation progress. Rather than push the customer for a change order to make up for our lost time, we will often work “for free” until the job is complete.

Every customer a reference may be a slight stretch, since some customers may never be fully satisfied, no matter how hard we try. However, thanks to social media, companies and brands have to compete on a completely different level than they used to.   As a result, most customers now feel entitled to excellent service and select vendors, on the basis of good service, not just product or price.

This means that we must deliver unreasonable customer service.  If we’re merely meeting our customer’s needs, we’re not doing anything noteworthy.