My wife and I bought a “fixer upper” home. Well, more of an “updater” home that turned into a “fixer upper”. Much of the work I did myself, but certain parts required contractors. After 28 years in working with contractors, vendors and suppliers, I knew what characteristics to look for. Quality of work, passion for their work, responsiveness (response time) and the best sense of honesty I could gather from a short meeting. You want projects done right from the start, but let’s be real here, things break. Be it from human error, a manufacturing flaw, or just simple wear tear and un-expected abuse – Things break, things don’t perform as expected, a detail is missed, and sometimes things don’t want to do the job they’ve been doing without fail for the past year the one day you need them not to fail the most.
Many years back, I was at a seminar and the speaker called me out of the group to answer a simple question: “Define what is good customer service in your company”. I told him that’s it not my position to define it, it’s my customers job to do that. It’s my job to make sure that definition is in-line with my companies expectations. Now I thought that was a pretty good answer and the speaker seemed pleased with it too I was in my mid 20’s then and polished it up a bit since. So let’s circle back to “things break”………
Thing’s break, questions come up, and problems occur. That’s inevitable. At Comforts of Home, It’s how we work through them from our customers perspective that we use to judge ourselves.
Customer service is our top value at Comforts of Home. We make a good product, we strive for quality control through too many processes and procedures to list, innovation is talked about or implemented daily, and we build trailers taking into consideration all the “what if’s” 19 years of building them has taught us. But when our customer service is called on: #1 Be available and responsive. #1 Act with a sense of Urgency. And, #1 Come to a solution agreeable to all. Yep, all #1’s, because in customer service a #2 value just doesn’t cut it. So there it is. In writing and out there for all to see. Go ahead, put us to the test, talk to our customers that had “things break”, email me direct to talk through in more detail (aaron@cohsi.com), but just remember that in the working life of mechanical items, “things break”, but we will always be here and available. Let’s just hope that our cell phone and internet provider has the same values 🙂
Aaron Ward
