Customer Service: treading not so carefully, and telling it like it is.

I have a couple of worn pairs of Fluevog shoes, along with a crappy old pair from Aldo, and all desperately need new soles. They’re so worn they look like flat tires — I hang onto shoes as long as most guys hang on to their underwear. You wear them till they fall off, right?

Now that I’m living on the Dartmouth side of town, I need a new shoe repair guy. I need cobblers like some folks need a reliable mechanic. So I walk into a new cobbler shop. The shoe guy looks up at me over his glasses, looks at my armload of shoes, and he starts shaking his head like something’s really bothering him. Confused, I looked behind me – but no, he is shaking his head at me.

I say, in a friendly new-to-the-neighbourhood way, “how you doing today?” Very reluctantly, he (I’ll refer to him as the Cranky Old World Cobbler for short) puts down his work, and still shaking his head, he comes behind the cash counter. It pains him, but he barks out in a heavy, old world accent: “I’m busy! What do you want?”

Now, at Journeyman Film Company, we’ve been talking lately about the importance of customer service and what it means to us. In small business, everyone’s talking about it. And it should be pretty obvious what that means, right? Try to please the customer, and give them what they want. Do it with a sense of humour; be helpful, prompt and professional.

So I’m staring at this Cranky Cobbler, and he’s glaring back at me. I say: “listen, I can go somewhere else” – and in the moment, there’s nothing I want more than to give this guy the boot and demonstrably take my business elsewhere – you know the feeling, teach him a lesson.

He shrugs and points, “look back there, see how much work I’ve got? I’m three weeks behind!!! What have you got?” I say “no really, I can go somewhere else…” But he shakes his head, closes his eyes and gives me the just-gimme-the-shoes gesture.

I show him the special Fluevog soles I’d ordered for the Fluevog shoes, and I’m starting to feel a little poncey. He says “these better be rubber or they won’t stick…I can’t see what it says, can you read it?” I note that it says Latex on the sole: “ah…that’s rubber right?” No answer from COWC.

“You gotta give me three weeks, maybe longer. I gotta do a proper job, and this is going to take time.” At this point, he’s got me. In my mind, it bugs me that I’m still standing here and considering paying this guy money, but subconsciously I must be thinking that anyone who is this cranky, this gruff, and this reckless about customer service, has got to be worth the abuse.

So what’s the lesson in customer service? Tell it like it is.

There is a school of thought that says just tell clients what they want to hear, then fudge the rest. In bidding for work at Journeyman, we have been beaten out by certain companies that seem to do well by bidding low, and promising delivery by a certain date…only to push up the project’s actual cost slowly but surely, and deliver later than promised.

But in the end I still believe it’s better to tell the client a brutal and honest assessment of what a project will take in time, money and effort, rather than tell them what they think they want to hear. There’s too much at stake and if you’re going to take someone’s money for your services, you may as well make sure the job is done right.

So Cranky Cobbler tells it like it is, and it might not have been what I wanted to hear, but I’m going to be wearing my ratty old Vans sneakers for another three weeks while I wait for these other shoes to be done right.

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