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Being creative in extending the concept of customer service beyond what we understand to be best practices is challenging because it goes beyond having an excellent product. Take Ruffwear, an Oregon maker of accessories for dogs. Their website features photos of dogs and their owners, all company employees, enjoying the products in the great outdoors. Overseas buyers like everything about this approach, and the company gets a brand lift.
We can become complacent about our product and the passion we need to have for it. So be aware of what makes you smile when you encounter good customer service and think of how you can create a similar reaction in the online world.
For Vellus Products, a maker of dog shampoo that currently sells on- and offline to buyers in more than 50 countries. Their approach is using a “Warm Touch” with customers; this means treating distributors like family, getting to know them, and helping them out. Vellus will offer to buy ads for new distributors in developing countries who may not have the ready cash to make even such a modest but potentially important investment on their own. The owner is reachable by phone and remembers birthdays.
Your WPG correspondent, who occasionally travels the world in search of material that will inform and amuse you (and himself), was traveling domestically recently for the first time on a low-cost carrier with a reputation for good customer service. No, the two aren't mutually exclusive. While trudging down a concourse, there was a commotion at one of the gates. It sounded like applause, music, and more applause. Could it be a celebrity arriving, or news that the flight was actually leaving on time?
Closer inspection revealed that a gate agent for said airline was operating a talent show for passengers waiting at the gate to board their flight. It was a mini version of “America’s Got Talent.”
A little Frank Sinatra, anyone?
The agent was using the microphone and PA system normally dedicated to banal announcements. One passenger sang a pretty good rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon,” not that it was the best choice for people timid about going up in airplanes. Then came a poem and after that a woman performed a popular ballad, at which point the gate agent grabbed another passenger and danced a credible two-step around the podium. The audience, um, customers, lapped it up.
Your correspondent had his own flight to catch and needed to move on, but he could imagine the jetliner pushing back from the gate, empty--while passengers partied on in the waiting area.
Contrast that with a flight the next day on a different mega airline, more focused on market share and revenue per mile than making people happy. The agent was a monotone and haltingly read the script about seating zones and how many carry-ons you were permitted. Passengers milled, then moved like zombies on the way to the next airport. It made your correspondent want to grab the microphone and yell at the assembled cattle who had obediently shuffled to chute-like boarding lines: "Why don't you wake up and live a little! Come on. Everybody sing.”
“Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. See what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars.”
"I'm sorry, officer. I was just performing a little customer service experiment here. You want me to come with you?"
This little experience in a second-tier U.S. city’s airport doesn't mean that it does or could happen everywhere. But isn’t that the point? Someone had the nerve to try it, because he knew the organization supported him in doing it. For customers, this is a flight they’ll remember. In a good way.
It makes you wonder, as it should, how we can all put a little fun, a little something special, into how we go about our business.
| Product Model | Inside Diameter | Outside Diameter | Thickness |
| HMK1215 NTN | 12 | 19 | 15 |
| HMK1212 NTN | 12 | 19 | 12 |