One of the biggest lessons I ever learned in business came when I was attempting to get Boeing to buy our products for all their computers. We had gotten pretty smart maneuvering our small company to win Enterprise accounts. We'd closed major agreements with Travelers, Liberty Mutual, Bank of New York, and FedEx. Two of our major accounts, Starbucks and Safeco Insurance, were in Boeing's back yard. We had even won prestigious vendor awards with Lockheed Martin plus a major California utility. As I was bragging about our outstanding service, I mentioned our "24 hour response time." This was always a show stopper, because our larger competitors were notoriously slow in responding to technical support issues. Instead of being 'wowed' by our response time, my counterpart began to lecture me about the real meaning of service in a mild southern drawl. "We're in the aircraft business. We don't care about response time, we care about RESTORATION time. If a plane goes into a dive, it's not just how fast the pilot pulls back on the stick. It's how fast the nose of the plane comes up." This message has never left me, and it transformed our customer support to a new level even though we were already award winners. All vendors are going to experience a problem with a customer some time in their relationship. While communication is highly important, fixing the problem in a timely manner is the most critical element of customer service.
What I learned from Boeing- Fix customer problems rapidly.
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