Customer Service 101

My wife and I were returning home from a weekend-long baseball tournament hosted in Brandon, a town just a bit over an hour away from our front door. We had spend part of the Sunday afternoon shopping around for cars since my Taurus (named Fred) has 197,000 miles on it and my wife’s Volvo wagon has 160,000 miles. While both cars have been wonderful, we figure it’s probably time to invest in at least one with less than 100,000 miles on the odometer. We’re picky consumers so the process of shopping for a big ticket item is always painful. We want a car that’s smart (mpg + safety), classically styled and feasibly priced. I think it’s crazy that my 1996 Taurus can get 25 mpg and most mid-sized new cars aren’t offering much better miles per gallon! But as my wife and I agreed, we are to blame just as much as the car manufactures…kind of!! That would be like CFgear deciding “Well, our clients aren’t asking for better and better customized flash drives so we aren’t going to take the initiative to engineer ‘em!” That’s CRAZY! Sure. The business of making cars is probably a heck of a lot different than that of flash drives, but I’m confident if CFgear was making automobiles, we’d be considered the pioneers, the company willing to push the limit on engineering at all levels of manufacturing. Yes. A lot of CFgear’s innovations has originated from clients asking “Is this possible?” But we spend an equal amount if not more working on ways to deliver the most refreshing, most technologically advanced promotional flash drive products and solutions. If the car industry worked the same way, the market would be full of 40+ mpg vehicles!

Ok, so enough of my venting about the reality we are all faced with today – high gas prices + low attention to MPG engineering. This article is actually about some positive news about something that happened at the gas pumps. As I was saying at the beginning of the story, my wife and I were headed home Sunday afternoon. Ol’ Fred was running low on gas so I pulled off the interstate to fill up at the Shell gas station. We soon hit the road again with a full tank of gas but noticed that Fred seemed to be lagging on horsepower. We were about 20 miles away from home and we were able to make it to the off ramp when I heard a knocking sound followed by the car losing more and more power. Luck was on our side, however, and Fred found just enough heart to get us into our driveway before it came to what I was convinced was the “end of the road”.

I was sad for Fred but delighted that he’d been able to give me 12 years of dependable service! After having Fred towed to the service station for what I thought would be a “you want the bad news or worse news” diagnosis, I was told there was diesel in the vehicle. Yikes! I thought for sure my ADD was to blame. But I checked my “gas” receipt and sure enough I’d managed to fill up with what was supposed to be a 10% ethanol blend. So I called the Shell station to see if by some crazy chance there was diesel in the blend instead of ethanol and sure enough that was the case.

That was good news of course as it confirmed my mechanics findings. But the better news was how the station owner handled the issue. When I called and said I filled up my Taurus on Sunday, the man who answered the phone told me to hold on and handed the phone over to who I’d later come to know as Tom, the owner. Tom very smoothly explained to me that they discovered 6% diesel in their ethanol blend on Sunday and that whatever service needed to be done on my vehicle should be billed directly to him. I thought “Wow!” Just a few minutes ago I was speaking with my uncle, also named Tom and also a gas station owner, about whether or not such a mistake could happen and if so whether or not he thought the owner of the station would fess up to such an issue. My uncle Tom said it was not unheard of for mistakes like having diesel in a gas pump to happen. He proceeded to say that if that was the case, I wouldn’t be the only victim and the owner would be honest and upfront about the issue. Well, kudos to both my uncle Tom for encouraging me to call the station and more kudos to the other Tom who turned this issue into a refreshing “I’m sorry for the mistake…let me make it easy for you…have whatever work the service station needs to do be billed directly to me” customer service case study.