Focusing experience on a customer service call

I shared this with some colleagues who found it inspiring and I thought it might also be generally interesting to others:

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On a recent trip to Dallas, I arrived at the customer’s business on a Monday morning. They’d been down in production for more than a day the week before. As I walked in, everyone in the shop looked relieved; their shoulders relaxing. They were a smaller shop that depended on their processor for making blanks to run their plasma tables and to make rectangular duct. So, the entire shop was out of commission while that necessary machine was down and essentially inoperable.

I quickly connected with my laptop and let them run the machine for a couple of hours off that. They were elated to learn that this was an available service option. Within just a couple of hours they’d built up enough blanks and ran enough duct to get the rest of the shop back up and running and profitable again.

Those were hardworking people. They were on the floor busting their butts every day in a hot dirty duct shop suffering the elements and rewarded with reduced hours. Not a ballistic owner present voicing concern over profit margins, but real people who share in those ventures. In fact, the operator’s wife was pregnant and actually went into labor towards the end of my trip and he couldn’t make it in that last day. The magnitude of lost work falls to those that are the most vulnerable; the family.

So, on this trip I gained a better perspective of just how important our machinery, controls, and software are, both personally and professionally. I saw a dozen lives with families and mortgages and car payments tightly tied to our ability to provide quality equipment and expedient service.

I used this as a wake-up call for myself and I put together documentation while waiting for my flight back. I wanted to make sure that no one ever has to be affected like this again because of a lack of insight. A point in fact, this document proved immediately helpful with another customer having a similar problem but then being able to function from their own laptop thanks to that document.

I’m sharing these notes to encourage each and every one of us to keep the thousands of lives that depend on us each day in mind. It’s more than just those of us here at the factory and our lives and families. We have many hundreds of installations which multiply that demand on us to continually look for better ways to communicate to one another and make sure there are no roadblocks to continuously improving our products, services, and customer experience.

Best Regards,

John Welty