May 15 2007

Brilliant Client Service: It’s Not Just for Peaceful Revolutionaries Any More!

Brilliant Client Service:  It’s Not Just for Peaceful Revolutionaries Any More!

I just read this quote, attributed to an unlikely source, Mahatma Gandhi, in an annual report from InfoUSA, one of the biggest public companies in our industry:

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us.  We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work.  He is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

This quote is widely believed to actually be from Gandhi, despite questions about that authenticity, at least according to one expert.

But boy is the content spot on.  We literally just finished developing something we call the Return Path Client Promise a few weeks ago, which you can see here.  The trick to getting something like this to work is that it has to be truly genuine and come from within, not from on high.  Our marketing, sales, and account teams worked diligently over the course of a couple of months to draft and refine this document and make it accurate and meaningful.