Our Customers Are Always Right

Received a call the other day from Stone Ermentrout from Stone Tevis, Inc. Mr. Ermantrout began by saying he was an old customer with a new problem: he had received a disconnect notice and could not understand how it happened. Interestingly, instead of sounding aggravated – as I can tell you I would be in his shoes – Mr. Ermantrout was calling to alert me to a potential problem. I’ll bet, he said (and I paraphrase), you have other people who don’t pay their bills from time to time because they think your invoice is junk mail.

I pulled out your invoice, he said, and sure enough there was a PO box in Houston and a PreSort 1st Class postage box in the corner.

So instead of complaining that he was disconnected, Mr. Ermantrout was calling to make sure we knew that he had probably tossed our invoice out as junk mail. He surmised that other customers might be doing the same thing. I’ll bet your delinquency rate would drop, he concluded, if you changed the envelope and made it look more like a bill.

I called out to Gina Goldberg, our intrepid VP of Sales and Marketing, whom I heard talking outside the office I share with three of my colleagues, and I relayed the story. Amazing, she said, I think we’ve gotten another call on that recently because we were working on this just the other day. She went back to her team and asked how much it would cost to retool our invoicing format. $40,000? She got off the phone and said, “It sounds like a lot, but can you imagine how many customers are bouncing off walls now when they get these disconnect notices? We have to do this.”

I picked up my phone and called James Ganter, head of commercial sales. “James, I’m sending you an email with a customer name. Loot the supply closet and send him a package of our uniform sweatshirt, a Max and Murphy doll, and a mousepad.” Then I called Mr. Ermantrout. Unfortunately, he had just gone off to a meeting but when I left a message his secretary said, “Oh, you’re the folks I send the gas bill to every month.”

I said “Please tell Mr. Ermantrout that there is no reason to return my call but I just want him to know he is my favorite customer in Atlanta today. He’ll know why.”