Here’s the sample input: undercooked chicken.
Restaurant 1′s manager:
“That chicken won’t take very long at all to cook – I’ll get it replaced for you right away. I’m so sorry about this, there’s really no excuse for it. While you’re waiting, are there any appetizers I can get for you? On the house, of course. Let me get you some menus – choose whatever you’d like.”
Restaurant 2′s manager:
“We’ll fix it,” with the dish yanked roughly from me and a replacement dropped wordlessly on the table minutes later, without hint of apology or even embarrassment. Annoyance, on the other hand, is exuded in abundance.
Which restaurant do you feel better about?
Restaurant 1 is a clear paragon of basic decency and above-average customer service. Restaurant 2, despite delicious but somewhat high-end fare, gives the same rude service you’d expect from the most indifferent fast food joint at the busiest rush hour.
But why bother giving above-average customer service? It takes time, it can be expensive, it may require significant investments in training if your team is large or spread out.
The business case is an obvious one: negative word of mouth travels with much more grease than does positive. One bad customer interaction can mean the loss of future business not only from the person you’ve disappointed, but also from many of the people they know. There’s also the trope about it costing more to replace a customer than to keep one. Worst of all, if other customers witness an especially bad interaction, they might abandon you themselves despite an otherwise trouble-free experience. No one wants to deal with a someone who looks like a crook.
That’s a short list and there are plenty of practical reasons not to screw your customers. They all miss the point.
You should give above-average customer service because it’s fucking wrong to give anything less.
I am not a man of any faith. There are few things I hold sacred. This is one of them: If you work a job at a business and interact with customers, whether you are the lowest paid hourly employee or the CEO, your highest duty is to the customer. Not to policy, not to your boss, not to your shareholders, not to anyone alive before your customer.
Why? You would starve without them. The roof over your head, the lunch in your stomach, the weekend trip you’re about to take – all of it exists thanks to the grace and honesty of the customer who will pay, time and again, for access to your goods or services. If their satisfaction, their absolute fucking bliss, is not at the core of what you’re doing, you are absolutely, one hundred percent doing it wrong. I don’t care if all you’re doing is punching the clock, if your boss doesn’t care about you, if you hate the stupid uniform. I’ve been there, it sucks. Doesn’t make a difference – you still owe the customer the very best you have to offer. It is your duty. In my retail days I sometimes broke the rules and defied my boss to make my customers happy while giving them the respect their patronage had earned them.
When you ignore that duty, when you maximize profit and personal convenience at the expense of loving your customers, you will eventually be slaughtered brutally and painfully and your customers will laugh when that day comes. Want proof? Look at Blockbuster. Everyone who existed in North America in the 90′s has at least one tale of woe at the hands of the video store’s brutal late fee policy. Blockbuster stocked only movies that were obvious mainstream bets, with a few token art house and foreign selections, without bothering to sort out what their customers actually wanted to watch.
Then, one day, technology changed, allowing the entry of a bizarre new competitor. Netflix, out of nowhere, showed up and gave customers genuine respect. Netflix provided a service with generous, flexible terms, abundant selection and entirely reasonable pricing. The offering was so compelling, people changed their habits to accommodate this weird mail order movie service. Netflix, in turn, listened to their customers and broadened their selections further while building ever more distribution facilities to ensure that no one had to wait more than a day or two for fresh movies. Through Watch Instantly, Netflix continues providing incredible value instead of becoming complacent and allowing the rise of someone else with a better feel for the needs of their customers. Most importantly, when a customer has a beef, Netflix makes it right with friendly, generous customer service and proactive communication that owns up to every screwup.
It’s up to you. Do the right thing for each customer every single time and sleep well at night with the knowledge that your business is safe and you’re a good person. As for the alternative: I have a handy chart for that you may find instructive.
Choose wisely.
Footnote:
If you’re wondering, restaurant 1 is the excellent Spice in Winter Park, FL. Restaurant 2 is Greens & Grille, in Orlando. Greens & Grille has one particular manager who seems so exceedingly annoyed at the very existence of my girlfriend and I that we routinely forgo their delicious, sublime organic meals because we’d rather not feel quite that unwelcome. We eat three times a day. That grumpiness has cost them, in the last six months, what could have easily totaled hundreds of bucks because they’d get our business a few times a week if we actually felt welcome there.
Once upon a time, I was a search engine marketing manager. At the tender age of 20, I was responsible for over a million bucks in marketing spend. The numbers were intimidating for the first few months. Then they just became numbers and ceased to frighten me. It was a cool first job and a great opportunity, but I’m glad my days of search engine obsession are behind me.
The most stupefyingly boring part of my job was the incessant need to generate reports in Excel. As anyone who knows these things will attest, nerds will do anything to avoid boredom. For me, I’d spend four hours building a reusable reporting tool in Excel instead of two miserable hours plugging static values into a one-time use spreadsheet. Funny enough, Excel was my first foray into programming and product development. I did everything I could to make honest-to-god tools within the narrow confines of its formulas. By the end I had attractive spreadsheet layouts that could be updated in a handful of minutes with none of the error-prone tedium of one-off reports. My Excel-Fu is strong.
Recently, I asked a friend with deep financial savvy for some broad strokes advice on basic stuff to worry about as I went into business for myself. Among other good advice, he suggested I keep track of every single expense I incur, with categories.
This is good and obvious advice, but I hadn’t really bothered to do it. Newly encouraged, I found a bunch of overpriced, overcomplicated tools on the web and on the desktop. I’m sure there are businesses that need this kind of overkill, but I’m not there yet. More galling still, even the simpler tools on the web demanded a monthly fee.
Keeping track of my expenses by adding a new monthly expense seemed counterproductive.
Excel is dogshit, so I fired up Numbers and built a Cashflow reporting tool. You enter your expenses and income and it generates a report showing your monthly cashflow, with a chart and everything. Gives you a quick handle on your simple business’s finances and at tax time you’ll have a tidy list of your expenses. You can sort the input lists if you want but all you have to include is a date for the report sheet to work.
I share it now with you, my friendly reader, with no implied or express warranty. Enjoy!
Download Cashflow Tracker for Numbers (iWork 09).
For the last two years, one of the most fun parts of my (soon-to-end) day job has been giving the occasional tour for visiting VIPs. Sometimes my boss has his schedule packed so tight that he can’t do these tours, so I get called in as his relief. I’ll definitely miss this when I’m gone — it’s one in a small list of things I do extraordinarily well.
A couple of months back, a Washington DC-based intellectual property attorney from a prominent national firm came for a tour. Let’s call this guy Rich. I was tapped to run the tour, but when one of the owners decided to come along, I spent the bulk of the morning opening doors and walking quietly alongside the conversation. I was extra quiet when the subject turned to the recording industry. Rich explained that he wasn’t terribly popular for representing the recording industry but that it was important work. He then trotted out the same tired old tripe suggesting that a decline in recording industry revenues was caused by piracy — a decline Richard assured us could be reversed if only young people were educated on the importance of respecting intellectual property.
This is Bullshit
I listened to all of this and swallowed so hard I bruised my own throat. First of all, as has been mentioned, piracy is murderous, ruthless work done by indefensible criminals. What these guys mean is bootlegging.
I failed to ask Rich if it were possible, just even the slightest bit possible, that recording industry revenues were on the way down because the record companies make over-priced garbage. I failed to mention that education is indeed necessary… for the luddite morons who ran these businesses into the ground in the first place. I failed to point out to Rich that if each pirated track really represented a lost sale, any miraculous absence of bootlegging would have to also transform the economy dramatically as to permit people the opportunity to drop $20,000 on a half-filled iPod Classic.
I failed to say any of it. Whaddya want from me? I’m not my own man for another few weeks yet.
Even so, the encounter was instructive. I learned that there still exist real, living, breathing people who believe this bullshit. Not to be ageist, but I suspect being over 30 years old has a lot do with this, though surely there are exceptions in either direction of that mark.
The recording industry has spent millions of dollars on technical and legal measures to prevent bootlegging. The pinnacle of that achievement? A multi-million anti-piracy measure that was defeated with a Sharpie and the most impressively tarnished image of any industry that doesn’t make guns or pollution. I’m talking out of my ass, but I expect that the number of people who partake in bootlegging has only grown since this crusade began. Talk about money well spent. Can you imagine where their business model would be if, instead of wasting their money fighting an unstoppable force, they’d instead took a good hard look at the way the wind was blowing and invested that cash in reinventing their business model in such a way that made bootlegging irrelevant?
The result would be a recording industry that neither you nor I could recognize.
Instead, the RIAA makes a habit of suing the very people to whom they’d like to sell their product while attempting to destroy any service or platform that challenges the traditional ways for people to discover music.
Unstoppable Force
Anywhere there exists a non-scarce encapsulation of value, that value will be reproduced and distributed outside the bounds of the author’s license or intent. Put another way, if your shit is digital and desired, your shit will be pirated. The question with piracy isn’t whether or not it will happen. The question, rather, is whether or not your digital property is valuable enough to be worth the trouble of pirating. Trouble, here, has a very flexible definition, depending upon how much stands between wanting to distribute and being able to distribute. This varies from platform to platform, from absurdly simple with digital music to decently pain in the ass with console games.
Why? There are two simple reasons. People want things and, as we know from economics, the capacity to produce is infinitely outstripped by the capacity to desire. Secondly, and most crucially, distribution is gratifying. People feel good sharing — that’s simple human nature. In many cases, too, distribution of something digital, something protected, requires solving someone else’s puzzle. The high that comes from accomplishing something intended to be impossible is well-known nerd crack.
Piracy is Always Possible
This recipe creates a world where the dreaded boogeyman of scary piracy will always exist. Any business model where a 100% lack of piracy is integral to success is doomed to failure. What to do about this truth is a difficult question — one beyond the scope of what I can tell you here.
What’s important to understand is that time spent fighting the unstoppable is almost always time wasted.
By definition, anti-piracy measures require an investment of development time that will never benefit your paying users. Who are you working for, if not your paying users?
You have a choice. You can allocate 500 hours to one of these options:
- Building an incredible feature set that your customers love
- Developing a new anti-piracy scheme that will be defeated in X weeks and may genuinely annoy your paying customers
Which do you choose? The exhausted Microsoft vs. Apple comparison is apt here. If you’re Microsoft, you roll out Windows Genuine Advantage and truly piss off anyone who ever has to reinstall Windows. If you’re Apple, you sell a five-pack license and let your customers buy on their honor. I’m sure there’s a decent set of folks who install Leopard on more than their purchased share of machines, but the Leopard family pack is ranked #201 in Amazon’s software sales and was an even better seller when Leopard was new. And you know what? Apple makes more money through the family pack than if they were dicks by using anti-piracy measures and only selling single-user licenses.
I’ve Got One Boss
And it’s not me. The boss is the customer. By definition, my customer doesn’t give a damn about the boogeyman. They want the very best features in a piece of software that does everything it possibly can not to annoy them. As far as I’m concerned, every minute I spend on anti-piracy measures for my apps is a minute I should have spent making something incredibly useful. I’m in this to make people happy with incredibly useful stuff. If can’t focus my time on that, there’s no point.
The only time I should worry about writing code related to users who haven’t paid me money is when their existence will affect users who have. If pirates adversely impact resources essential to your paying users’ happiness, by all means, write a bit of throttling code that gives their requests a lower priority.
You’ve Got a Decision to Make
Whether or not you spend time writing code that benefits you instead of your paying customers is a personal choice. I can’t tell you what you should do — that conversation is one you need to have with your collaborators and moneymen. The temptation is a strong one. I remember how angry I was when I discovered Tallymander being distributed by iPhone bootleggers for the first time.
Still: last week, I submitted my latest app, GlobeJot, for App Store review. GlobeJot’s source contains precisely 0 lines of copy protection code.
The choice is made easier for me by Apple’s inclusion of good-enough copy protection for iPhone OS apps. Even without that, though, I wouldn’t bother putting up much of a fight. I want to make money by creating honest relationships with paying customers who appreciate that I spend every last ounce of my energies making something they will love to use.
If that ideal one day ceases to be realistic, I’ll find somewhere else to put my productive ability.
My distrust for organized, established power began early. I’m not sure how many other kindergarten students had a nemesis, but I had mine. His name was Nick Davis and he was a dickhead. The specifics of his assorted torments have been lost in the mists of my early childhood memory, but rest assured they were heinous enough to sow a burning dislike for this kid deep in my 5-year-old soul. Between Nick and the idiots who ran my after-school daycare center, I already had a handful of people I’d come to dislike at an early age.
Ms. Cordova began our first week of school by assuring my later embrace of capitalism. She took all of our school supplies, dutifully purchased by our parents with varying levels of commitment to quality workmanship, and seized them for the collective good of the class. The means of kindergarten arts and crafts production were thus pooled for the duration of the year. Knowing my mother as I do, I can only imagine how she’d seethed at this news. Despite what was invariably a limited budget, she’d been excited to provide me with quality stuff for my very first year of school. Her dismay at the thought of my rich and lustrous Crayolas being commingled with shitass waxy RoseArt crayons was a feeling that transmuted easily to anger at the well-meaning Ms. Cordova, who quickly redeemed herself as an otherwise excellent teacher.
I wasn’t thrilled to say goodbye to my first set of school goodies. I tempered my disappointment by seeking out the most exotic of markers and tools each time an art project brought us to select from the collective supply depot. In no time at all, the incident was forgotten amid all the crap that kindergarten students spend their days doing. Before I knew it, the sweet, perfect feeling of the last day of school was upon us.
Ms. Cordova said many sweet things to us and encouraged us all to do well in our lives. We then began the business of settling our kindergarten affairs: collecting our art and classwork into handmade, oversized folders. At the end, what remained of the art supply depot was redistributed to the class. We each got some say in our spoils and my top priority was to secure a year-long favorite: a long, slender Crayola marker of deep and lovely crimson – my favorite color at that age. I secured my prize and a few other selections and closed the book on kindergarten.
Or so I thought.
There remained the always interminable afternoon of mindless daycare time. This bothered me less than it otherwise might have as I contemplated the future and reflected on my collection of classroom junk. The afternoon passed unremarkably and I busied myself with my newly-claimed marker. Which, I now noticed, had a name inscribed in tiny, fine-point permanent marker and cursive script: “Nick Davis.” This, I knew, was written by his mother, doubtless similarly unaware of the seizure of property that would follow. Smugness washed over me as I relished finally getting one over on my bully. The marker’s dark red ink seemed richer than ever.
Then Nick, also a daycare inmate, strolled along to say whatever it is that very young people find so dismaying. Today, thousands of hands of Poker have taught me never to overplay my hand. Back then, I was infinitely more impulsive.
“Oh yeah? Well now I get to keep your marker,” I said, waves of invincibility and vindication blasting from every pore.
Uncharacteristically, Nick shut up. Even more unusual, he turned and left me alone. I frowned, but held onto the feeling.
Minutes later, Nick returned. Accompanying him was one of those people whose list of accomplishments ended with “completed high school” and who were thus popular at my particular daycare.
“Did you take Nick’s marker?” The daycare employee gazed at me as she spoke, words plopping out of her mouth like bits of mayonnaise.
“Uh, no,” I stammered. I then explained the restitution Ms. Cordova had made earlier that day for collectivizing our stuff.
“Yeah, but it has my name on it,” Nick squealed, pointing as emphatically as any child his age could at the meek white instrument in my hand.
The employee looked at the name scribbled on the shaft of the marker and confirmed Nick’s assessment.
She looked pained as she told me, “I’m sorry, it has his name on it, I have to give it back to him.”
I didn’t put up a fight. I hadn’t quite learned how to stand up for myself yet and, unaccountably, these employees were authorities like my teacher at school, like the police, like my mom. I relinquished the marker to a jubilant Nick.
I spent the rest of the afternoon stewing. I also hadn’t learned how to curse, but I’m sure if you translated my brainwave patterns to a modern equivalent, they would have read “What a bunch of fucking idiots.” I was never the kid who painted his nails black and listened to depressing music, but nor could I ever again blindly accept existing authority or “the way things are done.”
Today, I would change none of it. Iconoclasm is power to ignore established limitations, throw out the rulebook and go further than everyone tells you is possible. It opens your eyes to new ways of thinking and new means of solving problems. I suppose the social order requires that this way of thinking be kept to a bare minimum, but if you’re among the lucky few who delights in a bit of herecy now and then, shed your shame for it and trust the alternatives it helps you to discover.
In my adult life, few things have ever been more satisfying than going beyond what people have told me I was capable of doing.
At the same time, I find myself wondering how much this particular leaning of mine handicaps me. In the long term, I resent the hell out of being led or managed. I also dislike leading others. I am an organizational anomaly, suitable only for short-to-medium-term freelance work.
I think I’m okay with that.