Pre-Customer Service

It’s one thing to take care of a customer. It’s a very different thing to take care of someone who might become one. It makes me wonder if this might be a potential growth area for many businesses, when it comes to customer acquisition.

[There is a significant disclosure made at the bottom of this post, FYI]

Recently, I made a mistake that is unique to our era – I left my phone (a Samsung Galaxy S2) in a cab, accidentally. To make matters worse, I don’t know which cab company is responsible for the cab I left it in, despite swearing up and down to six different representatives that I was SURE it was their fleet.

This presented a couple of problems for me. One: I was less than a week away from the end of my previous job, which meant I was less than a week away from the end of my corporate cell plan – I was also up in the air about what my options were going to be in the near future, and was kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place; it’s difficult to be a digital strategist, let alone an urbanite in his late 20s, without a mobile.

I did what I usually do, when I’m running out of options… I asked the internet, by which I mean Twitter.

There were a few people who I was hoping to come to my rescue, but I definitely wasn’t expecting @RogersMelanie to reach out, for a couple of reasons. For one, I wasn’t a Rogers customer – my cell provider at the time was Bell. For another reason, I wasn’t even using any of the other services provided by Rogers – my internet access is via 3web, I prefer Netflix over cable, and I don’t have a home phone.

But Melanie reached out, and we exchanged a few DMs. When she realized I was still looking at my options for mobile providers, she asked me if I’d be interested in trying out a Rogers LTE device, and seeing if the service was what I was looking for. There was no hard sell, no expectation of any kind in return, and without extracting any kind of promise that I would sign up.

To be blunt, this is the kind of customer service that got me raving about how great being an Apple customer was; with the crucial difference that I hadn’t spent an extra $300 on a warranty.

I completely understand that it’s beneficial to reach out to influencers (and I hesitate to label myself one), but this wasn’t part of any outreach campaign that I’m aware of. This was an attempt to build a connection by helping me out when I really needed the assist.

And while I know there are probably a lot of people in my life who’ve given Rogers a hard time at one point or another regarding their Mobile business, I’ve been impressed by the experience. If someone were to ask me which provider they should go with at this exact moment, I’d ask them a dozen questions about what device they want, what their needs are regarding their plan, and what offers they’ve gotten via phone, and in person, through representatives.

But then I’d tell them that I’d recently had a great customer service experience with Rogers, without being a customer.

[DISCLOSURE: At the time this occurred, I had no connection to Rogers whatsoever. However, earlier this week, I found out that my new employer counts Rogers as a client, and I will likely be doing at least some work on some of their initiatives in the future. I can guarantee that neither myself, nor the Rogers representatives I spoke to, were aware of this when any of the events above occurred, but to avoid any impropriety, I wanted to call this out explicitly.]