A few weeks ago, my wife took her car to a mechanic for an oil change. The next day she called me when she found a puddle of oil on the garage floor. After we spent a few minutes trying to figure it out over the phone she decided to take the car back to the mechanic. That evening she told me that he fixed it for free, her next oil change will be free, and he scheduled a time to come and clean the oil from the garage floor. She was puzzled, wondering what was the catch and why was this place going to such great lengths for some spilled oil in our garage.
This reminded me of a book I have been reading by Dan Ariely, “Predictably Irrational,” which I borrowed from a very cool and interesting friend at work. What this mechanic did relates to customer service by making things right with my wife, the customer. He did it in a clever way when he impacted different facets of the customer relationships built with both my wife and me. First, he addresses the financial relationship by making services free: free to fix the current issue, and free for the next oil change. We know the cost of an oil change and expect to always pay for this service so he directly impacted that financial relationship. Next he impacted the social relationship. By offering to clean the oil from our garage floor whenever was convenient for us he earned our trust. The result of these two relationship actions created something very powerful in us as the customer which was: Expectation. The next time my wife thinks about an oil change, she most likely will think about taking her car back there. Not because she expects something will go wrong and she will get something in return, rather because she knows no matter what she has done to her car she’ll expect it to be done right.
This came to my mind because of the book I mentioned and because I have been thinking lately about how we provide service to our customers, internal or external to IT. How do we make things right for them when we miss a deadline, or when we deliver something broken, or that doesn’t meet their expectations (requirements)? What expectations do we create when we deliver the wrong functionality on time, or when we deliver the right functionality a few weeks late?
How do we develop the best customer relationships when delivering our IT&S solutions? I am still figuring it out let me know if yo have any ideas.
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