The $4 Million Complaint Call

This is one of the reasons that is hard to adopt the "80/20, walk the difficult customer" approach; I have seen the right manager turn a bad client into a good one too many times. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

A bank was going to turn down an account for some long-haired young man in jeans who wanted his statements forwarded all over the place. Then some young employee told the middle-aged manager he was a wealthy rock star who needed his bank statements available while touring.

Some young bank teller with an attitude was being an ass to a guy in coveralls or similar, covered in paint and looking kind of like a day laborer. He finally got mad and said he would move his accounts if he did not get treated properly. She continued with the attitude and told him "Go ahead". He was the owner of a construction company and his accounts were worth millions. (Edit: And, yes, he moved them.)

It's shockingly rare to get good proactive customer service nowadays that by giving it a little attention, you can easily give yourself a competitive advantage of your entire industry.

I always appreciate a company that has top rate customer service.

Amazon.com is the best example I can think of these days.

Comcast is the worst.

This isn't "gambling with your time" this is "making good on your customer's commitment". And your note triggered a really interesting visceral reaction in me.

You can look at life as a series of choices you make and a scoring system by which you evaluate the quality of those choices. Typically a positive scoring system is used so the higher the score the 'better' the decision. It is often the case that people are judged by their scoring system.

Examples of scoring systems might be "how much money did I get out of that decision?" or "How many people are better off based on that decision?" These being centered on the individual describe the 'greedy bastard' archetype and the 'saint' archetype. Most people have a more nuanced system which combines the scores of several systems (is this good for my company? my career? my personal wealth? my celebrity? my family? my community?) which they weight sort of like the ice skating scoring system in the Olympics.

The point of the article was that if you're committed to your company and your company's success, then you decide to do what ever it takes to solve your customer's problems. That is because they took a chance on your product and you want them to be ok with their choice. Its an anecdotal story which illustrates a principle, of customer focused execution.

When you look at successful companies, you will see that they share this principle. And companies that do not, can be disrupted (like the US car industry in the 70's, the airline industry in the 80's, etc etc). There isn't any gambling involved. Anytime you spend extra time with your customer you win. That customer will relate that experience, win, they continue to buy your products, win, and they stick with you if you accidentally screw up somehow, total win.