It is cold outside where I live. Likely it is where you live as well. The current national cold front has many of us holed up inside, huddled together trying to stay warm. The actual temperature when I left for a meeting this morning was -11°F. Add in gusty wind and I am told it felt more like -30°F. I believe it! It was so cold that the U.S. Postal Service suspended delivery in many parts of the upper Midwest, including where I live. Whatever happened to the Post Office motto "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"?

The suspension of mail delivery during this cold snap reminds me of a business experience I had when I was a teenager. My father worked for the U.S. Postal Service as a mail carrier. He worked a rural stretch of northern Indiana. In one particularly cold and snowy winter, many roads had been closed due to drifting snow for a couple of weeks. When they were eventually opened, the snow plowed to the side of the road had buried most mailboxes. In order to reach the boxes and deliver the mail, someone had to wade through the snow to get to the box, uncover it far enough to get the door of the box open, and insert the mail. Since this required a lot of in and out of the vehicle, it was decided that a "runner” would be deputized to ride with the rural mail carriers to deliver the mail. This is where my brother and I came into a "business opportunity.” We were hired to be the runners. The idea was to run to the box and back to the delivery vehicle as fast as you could. Every second it took to get to the box and back added up to a longer day to make all the deliveries and get back to the Post Office before the end of the day. However, "running” through snow that was up to your waist was quite a paradox in terms. The process was tedious, bone-chilling cold, tiring, and worth it! Why worth it? It taught me a valuable lesson about customer service.

Policy vs. common sense in customer service

You might know that it is against the postal rules to allow a non-postal employee to ride with a mail carrier. They cannot double as Uber drivers while they are delivering the mail. That’s a regulation to guard the integrity of handling sensitive documents transported through the mail service. So, for me and my brother to travel along with the carriers to help deliver the mail was against the postal policy. However, the mail would not have been delivered to their customers had the local postmaster abided by this regulation. He chose to forego the policy in order to meet his customers’ desires. How many times have you seen a corporation stick to its guns when it comes to policy only to lose customers in the process? Policies are needed to help employees know what is right and wrong in a business setting. But when it comes to customer satisfaction, many times corporate policies get in the way of common sense. When it comes to one or the other, break with policy and go with common sense.

There is great satisfaction in taking down the obstacles to get a job done

Another lesson learned about customer service is extra effort makes a difference with customers. Even if the customer doesn’t necessarily see all the steps that went into delivering service to them, they do know you delivered. They see the end results. There is something else at work when you have to overcome obstacles to get the job done. It changes your confidence. I am a firm believer that confidence is communicated to customers, many times non-verbally. In an unspoken way, they trust you to do whatever it takes to deliver service to them. Trust is indispensible in a business relationship. In short, it is the difference between successful businesses and those that are not.

Reduce the fluff and get to the essentials of customer service

One more thing I learned while wading through the snow to deliver the mail: when you boil customer service down to its essentials, it is about doing a very few things very well. In my case, it was all about delivering the mail and getting back in the back seat as fast as I could. The delivery was important, but so was doing it on time. Time is often a precious commodity in customer service. There are deadlines to be met because we are conditioned to have little patience for slow delivery. On those cold days, there were many customers who were waiting on their mail. There was no time for fluff. So much of customer service these days has nothing to do with the customers’ needs or desires and everything about scoring high marks for the company. How many times are you asked to go online after a sale and fill out a customer satisfaction survey? I recently bought a gallon of paint at a big box store and the cashier asked me to take the survey by the end of the day. Why? Because she and the other cashiers were in a contest and the person who had the most customers respond to the customer satisfaction survey by the end of the day received a $50 bonus! I thought that if they really wanted to hear what I had to say, they would have paid me $50 for my thoughts on the spot! But so much of what is called customer satisfaction is nothing more than corporate manipulation of what their patrons really think. Real customer service happens without the pre-written surveys. It gets to the heart of what your clientele really want from you and how well you provide it back to them, pure and simple. What are the essentials of customer service? There are four: quality products/services, fair pricing, on time delivery, and being treated with respect by all your employees. If you want to score high marks from your clients, cut the fluff and get to the essentials of providing great customer service.

You might be wondering how much a deputized mail runner makes. I don’t know what the going rate is today, but 40 years ago $20 per day was the standard. That was about $1.65 per hour. Was it worth it? Every penny and more!