I purchased a bicycle from Sugar Bottom Bikes. Initially there was some issue with timely deliverability of the bicycle, but the staff at SBB diligently worked through their supply issues and sent the bike as advertised. All of my interaction with these folks has been online & via telephone, but they have gone above and beyond to overcome whatever issues that cropped up. They are responsive, frequently to an unfathomable degree. I'll send an email, and almost before I've hit "send," I have a response. And if it makes more sense for them to call me than to respond via e-mail, they'll do so. I really appreciate that level of customer focus. Customer service is something I pay a lot of attention to, whether it's a tiny small business, or the largest multi-national corporation, the customer is the whole reason the entity exists, and therefor it makes sense that customers would be a firm's primary focus. Sadly, this is often not the case. For SBB, it IS the case.
I can't underscore this enough. I've made my own career by providing customers what they want and need. Where I've worked, my co-workers might not appreciate my creative approach to problem solving, but my customers LOVE it. I figured, if I don't help the customer, someone else will. The net has been extreme loyalty by my customers. They care less about the company I work for, and more that they're working with me. Given the nature of my industry and my company, this is no small feat. I also can't emphasize that enough. My customer's dedication has been so great that I've had the president of one of the world's largest defense contractors call me at home, on my home phone on the weekend just to get my opinion on some technology issue tangential or unrelated to my core expertise. I wasn't bothered, I was flattered.
Thus, I view customer service as an important key to success. I believe, through experience, that anyone that practices it is virtually guaranteed this success. It's a simple recipe. It frequently is NOT easy, but it is simple. What I've done with my customers has often been VERY difficult. So difficult I've had scores of co-workers, everyone from the people that do physical implementations through to lawyers and senior managers and senior members of marketing teams tell me it "can't be done." My absolute devotion to my customers drove me to push forward, and in every case, what the customer needed done, I got done. So to say I appreciate good service has these experiences undergirding the concept. When others receive bad service, they often just shrug and say "Well, that's just the way it is." Not me. I pay attention, and SBB is one of those increasingly rare outfits that practices what I preach.
Yelp prompted me to consider Service, Selection, Value. Dutifully following Yelp's suggestions: Service: EXCELLENT; Selection: GOOD to EXCELLENT; Value: EXCELLENT read more