Satisfying customers is the secret of business success. And the secret of satisfying customers is for you and your co-workers to do high-quality work and provide excellent service that gives customers their money’s worth. That builds sales, profits, and job security.
The key to treating customers like royalty is for you to remember that your everyday work affects customers—regardless of whether you deal directly with them. An incorrect shipment, a carelessly assembled product, or a mistake in an invoice or billing can upset customers and may result in much bigger problems.
A rush order for pumps and auxiliary equipment was shipped from a Cleveland plant to a construction site in St. Louis. Before the equipment left, a shipping clerk put the installation drawings in a heavy plastic envelope attached to the side of one of eight crates.
When it arrived in St. Louis, the shipment was stored outdoors. No one took the plans out of the envelope, and no one covered the crate. It rained hard overnight, and because the plastic zipper on the envelope had not been tightly sealed, it filled with water and ruined the plans.
Whose fault was it? The shipping clerk in Cleveland? The receiving clerk in St. Louis? The bottom line is that this sequence of errors and oversights caused a costly delay in installing urgently needed equipment, which in turn, created a very dissatisfied customer. All of this could easily have been prevented if every employee had kept the customer in mind. It’s every employee’s job to satisfy the customer. Customers, in the final analysis, pay the bill for every bit of work done. When you give them good value, you guarantee your own paycheck.