What’s your recipe for customer success?

I got my first paying job at age 11. Five nights a week, I delivered the evening newspaper to about 200 homes. It was considered a “double route” because the canvas bags we “paper-boys” carried the papers in would only hold about 100 papers at a time.

Every day after school I would walk over to the delivery depot to find four bundles of the evening paper sitting in a pile on the floor with my route numbers on them. I would use scissors to cut the heavy plastic binding tape that held the bundles together, then discard the tape and the two sheets of brown waxed paper used on the top and bottom of each bundle to protect the print from smearing as the bundles got tossed around.

I would quickly roll all 200 papers, binding each one with a rubber-band and stuffing as many papers as possible into my canvas bag’s two over-sized pockets, then head out the door to deliver the first of my two routes.

After a couple of weeks, I had the routine down to a science and started to enjoy walking the streets delivering the papers. I couldn’t afford a bike yet, so for the first few months on the job I walked. After I finished the first route, I would walk back to the delivery depot, pick up the rest of my rolled papers and walk my second route.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job until my boss handed me a list of four houses I had missed one day. I was crushed; how could I have missed four houses? I didn’t have four papers left over. How did I mess up like that?

So the next day I was very careful to count all the papers to make sure I actually was starting my routes with as many papers as I should have. I counted them for both routes, double-checked that I had the right amount and paid special attention to make sure I delivered all of them to the right houses.

Two days later, I got a note from my boss stating that I had missed five houses the night before, and he let me know he was tired of having to drive papers over to all the houses I had missed. He said if I wanted to keep this job I had to do better. I told him I wasn’t missing any houses. He said, “If you’re not missing any houses, then why are people on your routes calling me all the time saying they are not getting their papers?” I was dumbfounded. I was sure I had been delivering all the papers to all the right houses on my routes, that I started with the right amount of papers and I never had any papers left over at the end of the day.

What was even stranger is that this seeming disappearance of some of the papers didn’t happen every day. Some days there weren’t any complaints, other days I would have missed a half-dozen homes. Sometimes a whole week would go by without incident, then boom: half a dozen houses missing their papers. My boss scolded me again for being an unreliable employee.

By now I was boiling mad. Was someone stealing the papers? If so, why were papers only missing on some nights and not others, and why always missing from at least four houses or more? Why never just one house? I really needed this job, and since I was walking both routes I had a lot of time to think about the situation in between deliveries. I analyzed this from hundreds of angles as only an 11-year-old’s wild imagination could.

On one very windy day, when the rain was coming down in buckets and sideways, what had been happening suddenly hit me. I had a hunch but couldn’t confirm it until the next day. Sure enough, the next day I found out that seven people had called the night before saying they didn’t get their papers, and I already knew which seven they were even before my boss handed me the list.

It wasn’t that I didn’t deliver the papers, but that the evening paper was to be delivered onto people’s front porches. Some of the homes on my route had front porches with almost no over-hang and no screen door. There was no place I could put the papers where they would stay dry if it rained. The people on my route with these unprotected porches had figured out that if they called the delivery depot and claimed they didn’t get a paper, my boss would drive a dry paper over to them.

I had counted up the number of exposed porches and there were about 30 of them between the two routes. To save my job, I needed to keep these 30 papers dry every time it rained, but how?

My answer was in the trash. These days, plastic bags specially designed for delivering papers are used, but back when I was delivering papers, they hadn’t been invented yet. The answer was staring at me from the trash. The brown wax paper that accompanied all the paper bundles every day was the perfect size and had just enough wax to protect the paper through just about any weather. Every time it rained, or looked like it might, I rolled 30 papers in the brown wax paper sheets from the trash and only delivered those to the homes with exposed porches.

I rarely ever had a complaint after that, and some people were so thrilled to have dry papers that they would tip me when I did collections. Everyone at the delivery depot thought I was odd, digging through the trash and wrapping papers in the discarded wax paper, but I was saving my job. So I didn’t care what they thought.

So what did I take away from that experience?

1. Frequently both the root cause of your problems and the solution are hidden in plain sight.
2. You can be 100% accurate in the performance of your job and still not meet the needs of your customer or your company.
3. People don’t care how good something is, or how hard you worked to get it to them if they can’t use it once it arrives.
4. People may be quick to blame bad results on the person they see doing the work, and slower to recognize systemic issues.
5. Some customers would rather exploit gaps in your company’s systems for their personal gain than tell you what’s actually going on.
6. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life delivering papers in the cold, wind and rain.

Since it’s the month of February, I’m going to focus on customer/client relations for a few weeks. Hey, we all love our customers, right?

Many of us in this community are somehow engaged with the process of creating websites for others. We may be creating them for family and friends, as a full- or part-time business, or we’re creating them for an organization, company or other entity we work for. Many of us have customers or stakeholders with whom we work before, during and after the launch of their website.

When our relationships with our customers go bad, it can often be very difficult to spot what happened, when things started to go wrong, and even more difficult (if not seeming impossible) how to turn things around.

What do you do to ensure good relations with your customers? And when things start to go bad, how do your get the relationship back on track? How do you find the root cause of the issue and address it? How do you know if your solution worked? Is there such a thing as “an ounce of prevention” when it comes to relationships with your customers?

Please share your recipe for successful customer relationships, and how it’s working (or not) for you. We want to hear your recipe for success for engaging your customers, what works, what doesn’t and what you’ve learned along the way.

Please, no customer bashing. Let’s try to keep things as upbeat and positive as possible. Also remember that what might not work for you, might be the perfect way of managing customers for another firm serving a different market segment.