Of course this is a trick question.

(The answer is “everyone.”)

…This answer isn’t as pie-in-the-sky as it sounds.  “Everyone” here is shorthand for “everyone, to the extent of their abilities, to the extent of their trainability and to the extent they interact with customers.”

Instead, teach Joan in Sales and Jeff in Shipping how they themselves can initiate a service recovery. Jeff may not be the right person ultimately to fix the problem, but if he encounters an unsatisfied customer, he needs to know how to do more than say ‘‘I can’t help you, I just send boxes.’’ Even Dale, who cleans the toilets, should be empowered beyond helpless reactions like ‘‘Um, you’d need to ask a manager about that.’’ Customers hate to hear ‘‘You need to ask a manager.’’

Dale will feel better about himself and your company, his customer will feel better about herself and your company, and service problems will tend to turn out better if Dale has been trained to express confident enthusiasm: ‘‘Certainly, I am so sorry. I will help you with that,’’ followed by finding the right person to solve the problem (even if that does happen to be, in fact, a manager).

Read more on this topic in Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization, coming from AMACOM Books, a Division of the American Management Association, in Spring of 2010

If your signage needs to be noticed, try making it noteworthy.

A business exists to serve your good customers, not to punish or warn away the bad ones.

I was reminded of this humorously in an Atlanta taxi the other morning.  Although feeling hale and hearty when I stepped into the cab, the power of suggestion started playing tricks on my stomach after I noticed this window decal:

Atlanta taxi window decal

In more subtle ways (and could there be less?), orienting any business toward the rare or hypothetical miscreant leads you quickly toward self-fulfilling prophecy.  Just because some knucklehead burned you with one bad check in 1978 doesn’t mean you should stop taking checks — or require eight forms of ID if you do take them.

So: your company runs a spiffy little promotion intended to grab you some brand-new customers.  Super — but how you treat existing customers who also happen to respond is just as important question. (And, studies show: existing customers are, in fact, the ones who pay the most attention to everything new you do as a brand, including your promotions and advertisements.)

The way Rachel, who was womanning a booth for The New York Times yesterday, treated me as an existing customer epitomizes the best of how someone can represent a business.

I was walking through a crafts fair in the Pennsylvania countryside as she searched for fresh New York Times subscribers to engage at her booth. She had brought along some spiffy New York Times gift items as incentives, and gave her pitch as people passed:

If your offer's good, prepare for existing customers wanting it too.

“Subscribe to New York Times home delivery, only $X a week, get great gifts!”

I said quietly, “Sorry–already subscribe.”

Rachel: “Are you getting all seven days delivered currently?  I can upgrade you if you aren’t.”

Me (chuckling at her persistence): “Unless you’re going to start a new evening edition, I don’t think there’s a way we can get more papers delivered.”

Rachel: “But these are nice gifts, aren’t they? I’m going to give you something anyway, for being a great customer. What would you like?”

Let’s look at this encounter. First, some overall observations. Note that I was just walking by at a crowded crafts fair. I hadn’t asked her for anything and hadn’t offered her anything in terms of making her numbers. I also hadn’t said anything about wanting the gifts. She could, however, sense the imbalance in the encounter, having nothing to offer one of the paper’s “full fare” passengers.

So she decided to extend exceptional, anticipatory service to someone who wasn’t even the target customer of the promotion.

—–

The encounter is both heartening and a little unsettling.  Unsettling because of the questions that were left in my mind.  As follows:

1.   Will Rachel get some bragging rights if her manager sees this post?  In other words, was she doing what The New York Times wisely wants her to do (support existing subscribers, who they recognize are even more valuable than a johnny-come-lately signing up temporarily on impulse)?

Or, did she get in trouble when she got back to the office?  In other words, was all she got for her good judgment a slap on the wrist for coming back one gift short?

More to the point, do you similarly give your employees the discretion to make sure your existing customers feel good while you’re out searching for new ones?

(Like you needed another excuse to treat yourself to the Four Seasons…)

Check out these paper stock eco-keycards.  Basic, but kinda brilliant.

And about damn time.

New four seasons paper keycard

Has Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, ever read Catch-22?

It seems pretty likely. What seems less likely is that he’s tried the sign-up process for his own new Internet service yet. Read on…

======

This afternoon I had some work to do and I figured it was time to head to Starbucks and try the new, free AT&T-powered Internet that CEO Howard Schultz seems so proud of.

I knew I’d need a Starbucks card in order to sign up (stretching the definition of “free,” but that’s fine). What I didn’t expect was what happened next: nothing. Once I bought the card and signed up with my powerbook, I couldn’t do anything. Instead, Starbucks/ATT gave me a message to the following effect (this is a close paraphrase):

Now that you’ve signed up, please check your email account for your access verification code, so that you can complete the log-in process and start using your new Starbucks Internet account.

But of course, Starbucks: This is why I’ve bought your card and gone through the signup process in the first place: to get Internet access.  I assume I’m not really expected to drive home to get the access code from my home computer before driving back to Starbucks to settle in with my laptop and a chai latte.

I’m something of a fan of Howard Schultz.  He seems like a good guy: he made it his personal mission, for example (and it’s quite an extraordinary example!) to provide health-care benefits even to part-time workers.  His autobiography, Pour Your Heart Into It, wasn’t a bad read at all. So it’s in a let’s-get-back-on-track spirit that I offer the following suggestion:  Before spending any more time on symbolic minutiae like changing the color of your Starbucks cups again, refocus on the actual feeling of being a customer in your own stores.  And what it takes to keep a customer in the store.

Not that it comes down to this often, in most lines of work. But an ultimate reason to be kind to a customer, or even a vendor, is the off-chance it’ll be the last time you interact.

Opening the Times this morning I saw what no business owner ever wants to see: my customer’s face looking back at me from the obits. A customer we were all proud to work with here, a well-loved veteran of our industry.

Somberly, I took a moment to look over my notes of our last interaction – hopeful, at least, that we had done right by him.

Here’s what I found looking over my notes: a project that had actually started with a small bump, and a customer who was gracious in giving us a chance to make things right. On what nobody could have known was to be his last project.

To speak with precision, he made our error seem small and merely bumplike, because that was his way: starting out a letter of very valid grievance with “First the good stuff– your staff has been excellent” before getting to the meat of what needed to be addressed.

So the transaction felt roundly satisfactory in the end, through his gracious way of bringing our attention to the issue, and, I’m hopeful to think, our way of resolving it.

That’s a nice way of leaving things, because you’re a long time gone.

It’s easy to think up a long list of products you wouldn’t market in a rest room. (Turn it into a parlor game and you could have fun playing it with your snarky friends, even.)

But you’d be scratching your, uh, head a long time before coming up with a product that’s less stall-likely than Cinnabon, a brand so successfully built around the scent of its product. In other words,

Cinnabon’s “gift of aroma and taste,” as the placard I found in the men’s rest room Friday at this Delaware I-95 rest stop put it.

You can see how this could happen–I guess.The ad, after all, was likely a free item for the manager at Cinnabon, a concessionaire to the state.

But contextual missteps like this are significant. Even when you get the air rights in the men’s room at no charge, your brand is not getting off Scott® free.

There is an urgency and importance to getting your green marketing right – before customers everywhere become completely cynical.

The solution is straightforward (no, that doesn’t mean easy), according to this post published by Seth Godin on Seth’s Blog.

Here’s the crux: as marketers, every green message we send out should  include a number, even if it’s an imperfect number. Here, as published on Seth Godin’s “Seth’s Blog”, is an excerpt from

The Coming Backlash Over Green Marketing

Micah points us to this campaign from Tumi Luggage. Buy some nylon luggage, they’ll plant some trees (one tree? A bush? It’s not clear how many trees per suitcase). It’s entirely possible that Tumi’s campaign is nothing short of generous, but as a consumer, it’s awfully difficult to tell.

–[snip]–

Consumers aren’t stupid (we’re dumb sometimes, but not stupid.) So, when the backlash hits, when every single brand has used up some green angle, then what?

Here’s what’s missing: a number. When you buy a fridge, there’s a big yellow sticker with a number about relative energy consumption. Now, we could argue all day long about how to figure out the right number (should the number on the fridge include data about the amount of energy needed to make the fridge in the first place?) but an imperfect number sure seems better than no number at all.

Drive to Philadelphia: 150.
Take Amtrak: 22.

Stick with the lightbulbs you have throughout your whole house until they burn out: 175.
Replace them all now with something better: 142.

Organic strawberries from California: 88
Frozen strawberries from California: 80
Apple from Dutchess County: 4

Read Seth’s entire post here: sethgodin.com/sg

………………………UPDATE……………………………………………..

Business Week called Tumi to follow up on this point, and the answers from the Tumi spokesperson are less than encouraging: Buying nylon luggage doesn’t in fact help the planet (though it brings pleasure to the planetary inhabitants lucky enough to be carrying it–Tumi makes indisputably great stuff). Business Week’s phone call shows exactly why the numeric concept (see below) makes such sense–Micah

………………………UPDATE………………………………………………

{SNIP}