Is Customer Service Really that Hard?

Should you expect good customer service, or are we just past all that?

Gabrielle Rhind wrote a post about open houses that made me think of customer service or the lack thereof.

A few years ago, my family and I were travelling with my two year-old son.  We had been transferred to a different plane due to weather problems.  What I wasn’t told, and couldn’t tell from the handwritten tickets done in airline code was that we had also switched airlines. 

We had to tranfer to a different terminal, and apparently our names were not added to the proper list.  The upshot was that when we reached the new gate, we were informed that we would have to wait for security to come to us to frisk us and hand check our luggage.  This caused a 20 minute delay in the flight.

At the end of the ordeal, having watched and waited patiently for his turn while 5 adults were wanded and frisked, my 2 year-old put out his arms in the standard position, and proclaimed “my turn.”  To this, the security guard responded, “We don’t need to check you.” 

His face crumpled.  I asked the guard to at least wave the wand over him, and was brusquely informed that this wasn’t a “game”.  My son’s response to this exchange was to begin to cry in earnest.

Instead of the happy, smiling two year-old I’d had moments before, I now had a howling, frustrated child to take on board a plane of unhappy passengers that were already twenty minutes behind schedule.

I understand that security isn’t a game, but how hard would it have been for them to take 10 seconds to make the 2 year-old happy as well as being less of a burden for the other passengers?

Sometimes it takes so little to make our clients happy, and yet many choose not to do these little things.

I will be discussing the little things I do to keep my clients happy in my Fairytale Marketing presentation at Rainstorm next week and this got me to thinking about some of my customer service experiences.

So my question for you is what little extras do you give to your clients to show them your appreciation and make them appreciate your customer service?