THIS Is How You Take Care of Customers

Good news needs to travel as fast as bad news—am I right? To that point, I must give a public shout out to the young woman who’s in charge of my website development, especially the very complex PBI 2012 Print & Media Conference registration pages.

Kerri Stinson of Grow Socially is my project manager. She’s my primary contact, and if you know me at all, you know I can be a demanding client. This week, Kerri taught me so much about the right way to treat customers. I had to share.

To give you some perspective: my team and I have been working feverishly for weeks getting the conference site pages in order so that we could “open for business” on a certain date. Attendee registration is complicated in ways I won’t bore you with, but trust me, it takes a lot of work and proofreading and testing of forms.

Coincidentally, my team members were unavailable on the same few days this week—just when I began testing forms and proofreading every site page. I had pushed our development team at Grow Socially, and God bless them, they came through early.

There I was, badgering Kerri every few minutes—over several days—with emails to fix this and double-check that, all the while letting her know my “open for registration” date was sacrosanct.

How did she react? Let me tell you.

She was always efficient, professional and responsive.

If she wanted to smack or throttle me, she never let it show. Every communication we had was terrific and polite. (She may have been throwing darts at a voodoo doll with my face on it back in her office, but I couldn’t sense anything except service and dedication whenever we connected.)

She must have sensed my stress (Duh!), because she knew exactly how to treat me—with quick email responses that usually included, “I’ll look into this right away.”