Three Lines Against Her Name

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the offence in it is committed politely, by somebody doing their job properly.

Two firms both greet a customer back,
Same woman, same returning need.
One asks her all of it again,
One says: and did the back room hold?
Same courtesy, same price, same trade.
Why did one greeting cost the job?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good. Each had a customer come back after two years, wanting something similar to what she had bought before.

The first took the enquiry properly and courteously. What was the address, what sort of property, what was the trouble, had she used anybody before, how had she heard of them.

Every question was reasonable and every one of them had been answered by that same woman, to that same firm, two years earlier, at some length.

She answered them again, because people do, and something small happened while she did. She had arrived as a returning customer, which is a position with a little standing in it, and by the end of the call she had been converted into an enquiry. Nothing she had done before counted for anything, and the pleasant afternoon they had spent working in her back room in the spring of the year before last had left no trace anywhere in the business.

She did not complain. What she thought, and did not say, was that she was evidently nobody in particular to them, and she got a second quote, which she had not intended to do when she picked up the telephone.

The second firm had three lines against her name, written at the time by whoever had done the job. The address and what was done. That the difficulty had been the damp in the back room and that she had been anxious about the mess because her mother was living with them. And that she had mentioned wanting the upstairs doing eventually.

So the call opened with: how did the back room hold up through last winter, and is your mother still with you? Then: you mentioned the upstairs at the time, is that what this is about?

Nothing in that is a technique, and it took eleven seconds. But she was not being processed, she was being continued with, and continuing is a different transaction entirely.

She did not get a second quote. And the upstairs job, which she had mentioned once in passing two years earlier, had been sitting in a book all that time waiting for her, which is a thing no advertising could have produced.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A customer who must repeat herself has been demoted to a stranger, however politely it is done. Every question you ask that she has already answered is a small notice that the previous encounter left no mark, and the whole value of having served somebody before is that it should not have to be established again. Loyalty is not a feeling that survives being ignored: it is built out of evidence, and the evidence is that you remember.

And the remembering costs nothing. Three lines written at the end of a job, by whoever did it, while it is fresh: what was done, what the actual difficulty was, and one human thing that was mentioned in passing. Not a dossier, and nothing you would be embarrassed to have read aloud. Three lines, kept where whoever answers can see them.

The third line is the one people leave out and it does most of the work. The mother living with them, the wedding in June, the fact that they were nervous about the mess. Those are the details that make a person feel dealt with by somebody rather than by an office, and they are given to you freely during every job you do, and almost all of them evaporate the moment the van leaves.

The second line pays in a different currency. Everything a customer mentions wanting eventually is future work with a name attached, and if you write it down you have a list of jobs that already exist and are waiting for their moment, which is the cheapest pipeline in this letter or any other.

Two cautions. Keep the notes to what you would happily show the person they concern, since anything else is not a record but a liability. And do not perform the recollection: reading a line back mechanically is worse than having forgotten, because it is remembering without interest, which everyone can hear.

Three questions, and check a real returning customer:

1. What does a returning customer have to tell you again? Listen to the next one. Every repeated question is a place where your business forgot somebody who had chosen you once already.
2. Who writes the three lines, and when? It must be the person who did the work, on the day, or it will not happen. Fix the moment rather than the intention.
3. What have your customers said they want eventually? If that list does not exist, you have been told about a year's work over the last three years and remembered none of it.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why did one greeting cost the job?

Because it was addressed to a stranger. Nothing rude was said and every question was sensible, and the effect of asking them was to inform a returning customer that her previous business had left no impression whatever. She went and got a second quote, which she had not meant to do, and the firm never learned that the call had gone wrong, since nothing had gone wrong in it. Three lines in a book, written two years earlier by a man with a pencil, were the whole difference.

The verse:

Ask her again what she once said,
And she becomes a name from nowhere.
Write three lines down the day you're paid,
And greet her like she'd never left.

Until next time. Go and write three lines against your last five customers, and have whoever answers the telephone read them before they speak.

P.S. The same three lines are what make a business survivable when you are not there, which is the other half of their value. A trade where all of this lives in one man's head is a trade that becomes a stranger to every customer the moment he is ill, and every letter I have written about staff and about being too dependent on one thing applies inside the business as well as outside it.

Also in the archive: The Ones Who Went Quiet, The Piano in the Parlour and The Printer's Apprentice.