There's Customer Service & Then There's Customer Service

As a predominantly internet business, my company rarely deals with customers in person. Occasionally, some hardy soul will find his or her way to our office/warehouse on the second floor of what used to be a movie theatre in suburban Saint Paul, Minnesota - that happens so infrequently that we are always surprised - and given the general state of things, not always delighted.

A decade ago, most of our business came in by fax, mail, or phone. When we decided to stop pulverizing trees by publishing catalogs and to head to the internet, we did so with some trepidation.

Yet in spite of all those electrons dancing from hither to yon and all over the globe, we've gotten to know some of our customers from phone conversations and the comments they write about the business in on-line evaluations or letters.

About a year ago [Ed. Note: May, 2005], on the day I was flying to Glasgow, Scotland, on holiday, I checked my email just before heading to the airport. One new order had come in, and it turned out the customers lived in Scotland and not more than twenty miles away from the bed & breakfast I had booked near Loch Lomond for the next night.

This was too good to be true, so I threw caution out of my carry-on, tore back to the office, did the paperwork and put a baton and carrying case in the space left by caution's departure, and then headed to the airport.

When I fly through the night across the Atlantic, my goal is to get in the rental car and drive no more than thirty minutes to my first night's lodging and then collapse. So after a brief nap, I rang up the customer - let's call her Ellen G - and after telling her my name, I said that I had good news and bad news about her baton order.

"The good news is that the baton has shipped. The bad news is that I'm here to deliver it in person."

Ellen tooks this news onboard very evenly. "My hustand and I are leaving in the morning for Lancashire where our daughter has a school performance. Is there any chance you could come up tonight?"

And so I got in the car, remembering to keep to the left, and headed north along the western shore of Loch Lomond in that period the Scos call the gloaming, with a crescent moon eventually lighting the night sky.

I turned away from Loch Lomond and found my way to the village of Arrochar on Loch Long, and shortly thereafter was knocking on the door of a stone cottage, and Ellen herself answered the door. No doubt she was surprised, and I was delighted. I gave her the parcel, and she invited me in for coffee.

Her husband Stuart came along, and we sat down and chatted for a few minutes. At one point she said that while I was enroute to the cottage, she and Stuart checked the picture of me on the company's web-site to make sure the guy at the door was the same person. I guess I couldn't blame them - stranger arrives after dark from the USA with something you've ordered online the day before.

As it turned out, the baton and case were to be a birthday present for Ellen's brother, and she would see him the next day. She told me that she would say to him that she had a remarkable story to tell him - but not until his birthday.

We talked about the internet, its advantages for people living in small villages, how she had come to order from us, what she and her husband did , and about the renovation of their cottage.

And then it was time for me to go. On the drive back, I thought about what a rare experienced this had been - to get an order from over four thousand miles from our office and to be able to deliver it the very next day. That has never happened before, although once or twice orders from London have arrived the day after I've flown there - I've always regretted the missed opportunity.

I don't expect this will ever happen again, and until Ellen and Stuart read this, they'll not know what a treat it was for me to be driving down from the Highlands later in the trip, and as we went past their cottage, I said to Karen, "I have a customer who lives in the stone cottage, just there. Nice people, she and her husband...she's the one who bought a baton for her brother. Hope he'll like it."

It was a great trip to Scotland, one of my favorite places ever, and after swimming in all those electrons all these years at The Nash Company, meeting one of our Scottish customers was one of the highlights of the trip. Maybe, just maybe, lightning - or pixels might strike twice and soon, because I'm heading back to Scotland shortly, and I have this funny feeling....