Recently I did some customer service training for a client. While we were talking about good service versus bad service, something happened that provided a great example of the impact bad service can cause.
Typically when I do customer service training, I will ask what the participants think of for good service, and who comes to mind. Then I'll ask them what they think of bad service, and who comes to mind.
When I posed those questions to the group, there was a lady that immediately piped up with no hesitation at all.
You could see the emotion spilling out of her. She shared that she had her house re-roofed the year before. The roofing company she hired had had been in business for a while, the type that has billboards all over the city. She contracted the job with them assuming that a company with that established reputation would do quality work.
The roof was completed a bit behind schedule but nothing that the woman felt was outlandish. However, the cleanup of the job site was left incomplete with a series of dangerous materials left behind. For instance, the nails collected from her yard after the job was "complete" filled two one-gallon ice cream buckets. That's got to be the whole roof worth of nails! Her calls to the company to take care of the cleanup were met with dismissive comments and no urgency at all. After weeks of frustrating exchanges, she ended up having to get the city inspector involved for the job to be completed to a satisfactory level.
It wasn't just the fact that she shared that story, but it was the emotion behind the story. Immediately after she told the story, everyone else in the audience wanted to know who the roofing company was, so they didn't ever accidentally hire them.
And in that room full of people, everyone immediately wrote down the name of the company when she shared it.
All of the challenges this company had presented stirred up powerful emotions in her. After reliving the experience during the training session, she actually went home and called friends over the weekend, just to warn them not to use that company!
That emotional connection is unbelievable when there's a bad experience. The experience was over a year old and she still couldn't wait to tell people not to do business with that company.
I asked the woman, "If I met you out in public and said I worked for the company you mentioned, what would you have thought?"
She responded, "I would have immediately hated you."
That's pretty powerful stuff! It shows why we need to have good bonding and rapport with people, and why we need to establish and maintain those good connections and good customer service.
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