Caring for Your Customers

Butch Welsch

Last night I was reading my weekly issue of the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration News. In this issue, Jen Anesi had a very interesting editorial regarding the importance of “random acts of kindness.” (See “Going the Extra Mile for Your Customers.”) She cited a number of these random acts and the whole article made me think of “Ed.” Ed was a service technician who worked for our company for over 50 years. Ed was not the greatest technical technician who ever carried a set of gauges. I’d put his technical skills art around a 4 out of 10. But when it came to people skills he was more like a 15 out of 10. He specialized in random acts of kindness.

Ed was extremely sought after by “his customers.” It was not unusual for one of his “little old ladies” to wait weeks or even a month or so to make sure Ed was the one that touched their furnace or air conditioner. Why was he so popular? Because he learned a few very important things early in his career. The first was that people like to talk about themselves and their families. The second was that people were extremely impressed that not only had he listened to their story about their kids or grandkids, but he REMEMBERED the story. In fact he remembered it enough, that the next time he was at their home, which probably was at least six months later, he would ask a question about that child or grandchild. This was not a just a show. He honestly was concerned about every one of his customers and all of the details which they had shared with him. He worked for us for 50 years not because he loved working on furnaces that much, but because he truly loved people. Unfortunately he passed away a couple of years after retiring.

I have to admit that there were occasional times when I would hear Ed down the hall at our office and almost wish I had someplace to hide. Not because I didn’t enjoy talking to him, but because I knew that I was going to spend the next half an hour, at least, listening about which kid in which house was going to which college and which daughter was dating whose son while I was remembering all the time that he was on the clock. He wasn’t wasting time, he was just doing what he knew best, and that was thinking and talking about people who were his customers. A point well made in Jen Anesi’s column was the fact that customers like to talk about themselves; in most cases they aren’t that interested in your issues. To that extent, very few, if any of Ed’s customers knew very much about him. He really never spoke much about what his likes were, where he was going, or what he was doing. All he really wanted to talk about was others.