By now, you’ve probably heard of the FedEx guy who delivered a computer monitor by throwing it over a customer’s fence. Yep, he tossed it right over what looks like a 6-foot fence.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKUDTPbDhnA[/youtube]
The customer wrote under the video, The sad part is that I was home at the time with the front door wide open. All he would have had to do was ring the bell on the gate. Now, I have to return my monitor since it is broken.
FedEx quickly handled the situation with the customer and came out with an apology to FedEx clients worldwide. According to Matthew Thornton III, senior vice president, U.S. operations FedEx Express, the driver is no longer working with customers.
There are so many questions, thoughts and comments we can have about this guy and this situation. But my hope is that you focus on a greater question: Is this how you’re treating your customers? If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you know I’m big on customer service and making sure your frontline is doing everything possible to take care of them.
In Is Starbucks Losing People To Perceived Indifference? I shared how customers will leave your business if they believe you don’t care. Obviously, throwing and breaking a customer’s new monitor screams just how much you care. But, as I discussed in that post, even not paying attention to a customer’s simple request tells them how much you care.
I believe there are three things team members need to not make mistakes like this:
- Vision – It’s imperative that your team believes that taking care of the customer is of the utmost importance. Without them, the team members’ jobs don’t exist. The only way to get someone to believe it, when it’s not already ingrained, is to repeatedly cast the vision. Over and over, you need to be explaining why and how to treat customers. As this becomes a mantra of your organization, anyone who disagrees will probably leave.
- Leadership – There must be a strong leader in place who actually knows that leading means people are following you. It’s someone who spends more time finding team members doing things right instead of always finding them doing things wrong. When your team feels they have an amazing leader who believes in them, they will strive to not let that leader down.
- Motivation – To care more about your customer than yourself, you have to feel like you are doing work that matters. If you wake up in the morning dreading going to work, then you probably don’t have a feeling of contentment from your job. But when you understand that delivering someone’s computer monitor brings them excitement and happiness, or helps them start that new business, or allows their kids to do better in school, then you cherish the item you’re delivering—without taking shortcuts. Plain and simple: If you believe in what you’re doing, you want to do everything in your power to help others believe it, too.
Right now, that driver needs a strong leader to take him under his wing and mentor him to a place where he loves what he does. And that mentorship doesn’t stop there. It needs to continue through the life of his career.
Question: What would you do if you saw this kind of behavior at your company?
