"I had ordered a bedroom set and also quite a bit of living-room furniture from Storehouse, a furniture company in the South. There were custom fabrics, so it takes a while to put together. The woman who took my order was great about calling me throughout the six or eight weeks I waited for the furniture to be made, saying, 'Here's the latest status.' It was really nice that she was so proactive.
The day of delivery arrived, and the guys showed up on time, which is great, and I left to run an errand. When I got back, I noticed that they had left me a letter. It said, 'When we brought the piece in, we smashed it on the truck and broke the leg and it was our fault.' I almost couldn't tell, because they had put it back together and it was stable enough to sit on.
Within minutes, my cell phone rang, and it was the same store assistant I had bought the furniture from in Dallas. 'I just heard about what happened,' she said, 'and I wanted to let you know that I'm very, very sorry. I know how long you've waited and how important getting furniture is. Here's what we're going to do: The guys reglued it and both sat on it and think it's stable enough for you to use. I've already placed a new order for the chair. I anticipate that it will be ready in four weeks. We'll deliver it at our cost, not at yours, and we'll also refund some of the delivery today for the inconvenience.'
I ended up writing a letter to the president and CEO of Storehouse about my salesperson because I was really impressed. Obviously, it wasn't an ideal situation because I had a broken chair for four weeks, and I had to figure out how to be home again for a second delivery, which is annoying. But I'm a devoted Storehouse user because of the situation. When a company mishandles something and it recovers with grace, it can create an even more loyal customer."
Ron Shaich
Chairman and CEO
Panera Bread
As told to Alyssa Danigelis
We were one of Sapient International's first customers. They did computer programming and we hired them to write some software for us. It was structural as opposed to just satisfying customers.
They locked everyone in a room for this massive project. Everyone had to sign off on it. The process starts with getting everybody who is a player on this in the room. We had all these white sheets. They kept the discipline of the process. They forced us to debate. By the time we were done we were really done. You need clarity of the view of where you're going. It forced us to make decisions about what we wanted to do and then from there they gave us a fixed price cost on what it would take to do it. That's really what it's about -- putting everyone in a room and going, 'We're not leaving until we're done.'
What they came up with became the whole dashboard for our stores. Before, it was a moving target. The dashboard was rooted in deep and fundamental process. The dashboard combined data from everything going on in stores -- sales for years, days, weeks, labor rates, cost, customer satisfaction, all this information. They were bringing it all together. We had the data, but we had to make it make sense.
One time they had a problem with their software and the machines it was running on. They actually went out and bought new computers and personally delivered them to us. I'll never forget being in the stairwell and seeing these guys come up lugging in the new computers. These guys are now each worth quarter of a million dollars. There was absolute commitment in their process.
It was amazing. It changed our business. We brought them in to do many more things later and have a longstanding relationship with them because of how they treated us when we both were much smaller companies. Information is power, my friend: what you shine a flashlight on, understanding what's going on.
Charlene White
Technical support representative
T-Mobile
As told to David Lidsky
"I had had to visit the emergency room at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico for my four-year old son to get a few stitches. He's okay, but later I received a bill from the hospital that made me a little concerned and confused because I have two different kinds of insurance. Amy, the person who helped me on the phone, was awesome. She never placed me on hold. While she was looking up what happened, she was taking my mind off of what she was doing. We talked about our kids for a few minutes. She knew where I was coming from, she put herself in my shoes. She figured out that the secondary insurance never got billed. I got a personalized, handwritten note the next day thanking me for calling them and for calling this situation to their attention. And every bill since has been taken care of. If you can relate to a customer, you can help make it 100 percent better."
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