Tag: Marketing

By J. Dean Spence

 

When I was 15 years old, I went on a trip to New Mexico. More specifically, it was at a spectacular scouting ranch called Philmont, near the town of Cimarron. It was a great trip. I climbed a mountain called The Tooth of Time, spied on the girl scouts when they were unawares, and saw all kinds of wildlife—including a swarm of ladybugs (from far away it looked like a strange red cloud, until it came close!), snakes, scorpions, and huge, scary-looking owls. I also learned a lot about teamwork and survival skills at Philmont. But I learned much more.

It was there that I experienced one of my first encounters with not so covert racism.

It happened in the dining area. Hundreds of kids were lined up to get lunch. When I made it up to the front of the line, the two white boys serving the food suddenly began to sing the Negro spiritual “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”. Their singing voices were filled with contempt, as were their eyes as they looked at me. They slopped down the food on my plate, and I walked away wounded—my appetite ruined.

Even though those two boys obviously needed to be set straight on a few things, I was the one who learned a lesson that day. A lesson about delivering good customer service.

You may not be a racist, but if you work long enough in customer service—or in any other external facing capacity— you are bound to eventually have to deal with someone you do not like, for whatever reason.

But your organization is counting on you!

Ultimately, customers are the only source of revenue for most companies. And all customers have what’s known in marketing as a lifetime value. Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, in Managing Customer Experience and Relationships,  define customer lifetime value as “the net present value of the future financial contributions attributable to a customer, behaving as we expect her to behave—knowing what we know now, and with no different actions on our part.” Peppers and Rogers also suggest that customer lifetime value is in a constant state of flux: it goes up when a customer receives good service, and goes down when that customer receives bad service. In short, if I receive good service today I am more likely in the future to continue to purchase goods and/or services from the company that provided them; however, if I receive bad service today, the opposite is true.

If that Philmont dining hall were a restaurant, do you think that I would ever eat there again?

Those two boys probably felt good wounding me, such as they did. But in the long run customer-facing employees like them only hurt themselves and their employers, not people like me.

I wish I could say that in the past when I worked in customer service that I remembered the actions of those two boys and treated every customer (even the ones I didn’t like) the way I would want to be treated if I were the customer. I’m human. However, after recalling that incident and writing this blog, in the future when dealing with external stakeholders in any capacity, I hope to remember the most valuable lesson I learned at Philmont.