{"id":4,"date":"2005-01-15T10:11:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-15T17:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fishingforcustomers.com\/a-customer-service-story\/"},"modified":"2020-06-27T08:53:55","modified_gmt":"2020-06-27T15:53:55","slug":"a-customer-service-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/a-customer-service-story\/","title":{"rendered":"A Customer Service Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
I promise this is not a story about making music. It\u2019s not really a story about my guitar, either. The guitar enters into it only obliquely.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tale of a memorable customer experience.
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\nThe curtain rises on our drama one fine Saturday afternoon in Corsicana, Texas. I was there on other business, but found myself in front of a Radio Shack store with a few minutes to kill. I had been idly curious about modifying my 1972 Madeira six string. Perhaps it could use an electric pick up so that I could plug the instrument directly into an amplifier.<\/span><\/p>\n

I owned a removable magnetic pick up that clipped into the sound hole. One of my friends had permanently installed a similar unit in his guitar. Frankly, though, I didn\u2019t like the look of that instrument with a foreign body stuffed into its primary orifice. No, a permanent magnetic pickup was not an acceptable solution. However, I had been considering the addition of a piezoelectric element inside my guitar\u2019s body, attached under the bridge.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Guitar stores and luthiers had such pickups, of course, but they cost in excess of $100. Being the thrifty, frugal, (OK, cheap) shopper that I am, I reasoned that there must be a much less expensive piezoelectric device that I could affix to my instrument. <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Where would one find an inexpensive piezoelectric element? Why, Radio Shack. The Shack was the appropriate place to start my search.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

So, there I was, that Saturday afternoon in Corsicana, Texas: a seeker of knowledge entering America\u2019s source of small electronic parts, on a quest to find and obtain an inexpensive piezoelectric wafer that might make a good guitar pickup.<\/p>\n

I meandered through the store back to the small parts racks, and found a couple of piezoelectric buzzers in small molded plastic cases. Humm. A buzzer\u2026 that\u2019s a specific loudspeaker application, isn\u2019t it? Aren\u2019t loudspeakers are just dynamic transducers wired to the amplifier\u2019s output rather than it\u2019s input? Put another way, aren\u2019t dynamic speakers merely big microphones? Logic is on my side. Perhaps this device could work, provided that I could successfully remove it from that molded plastic case without breaking it.<\/p>\n

It was time to ask a few questions. And this is where my story becomes one of memorable customer service.<\/p>\n

The kid behind the counter was the only employee available. I asked how I might determine the frequency response of the buzzer. \u201cBeats me<\/em>,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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I queried about its expected output level. This time I got a more verbose \u201cYour guess is as good as mine<\/em>.\u201d <\/span><\/div>\n
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Finally, I wanted to know if he had any mounting suggestions. His answer was completely truthful: \u201cI have no idea<\/em>.\u201d <\/span><\/div>\n
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Then the phone rang, and he picked it up saying \u201cYou\u2019ve got questions, we\u2019ve got answers<\/em>.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Please don\u2019t think I\u2019m ragging on Radio Shack. Over the years I\u2019ve found Radio Shack employees to be quite knowledgeable and very helpful. I\u2019ve had great fun telling this story and pointing out how few answers I actually received, but exposing the irony of this story is only half of the point.<\/p>\n

In Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads<\/a> Roy Willams says:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cThe World Inside Your Door is the world of the customer\u2019s experience: the place where you must make good on all of the bold promises you\u2019ve made in your ads. \u2026 Regardless of whether your customer steps into a physical store or merely contacts you by phone or Internet, advertising is finished the moment that contact is made. \u2026 Don\u2019t expect advertising to fix problems inside your door. If there\u2019s a deficiency in the quality of your customer\u2019s experience, fix it<\/em>!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

So my question today is: does your advertising prepare people for the world inside your door? It costs you too much to get a new prospect through that door to waste the opportunity with an experience that doesn\u2019t match his expectations.<\/div>\n
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Can you deliver in person the promises you make in your ads? Today I encourage you to start paying more attention to your customer services, there are companies like Salesforce<\/a> that can start showing you all the benefits you can get by just taking good care of your customers.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

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\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I promise this is not a story about making music. It\u2019s not really a story about my guitar, either. The guitar enters into it only obliquely. It\u2019s a tale of a memorable customer experience. The curtain rises on our drama one fine Saturday afternoon in Corsicana, Texas. I was there on other business, but found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4314,"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4\/revisions\/4314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop-my-site.com\/fishing2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}