Stepping Up by John B. Izzo Ph.D

Author:John B. Izzo , Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

How a Call Center Agent Won a Customer for Life

Leading beyond your defined role can happen in the most unlikely of places. Canadian Tire is a large, home-grown retail hardware and general goods chain. Some years ago the company leaders came up with a slogan: Customers for Life. They wanted to be so service-oriented and treat customers so well that they would become customers for a lifetime.

In some jobs it was pretty obvious how people could take the lead on this effort. But the connection was not so evident for one group of people, employees in a call center who spent their entire day calling people whose store-sponsored credit cards were overdue. All day long they called delinquent customers to try to get them to pay their bills. It sounds like a tough way to win customers for life. In fact, who wants customers for life who can’t pay their bills? It would be easy to cut some slack for anyone in that department who thought, “It’s not my job to win customers for life!”

One agent made an outgoing call to talk to a woman who was months behind on paying a fairly substantial bill to Canadian Tire. The agent asked when the money might be paid, and the woman told her a story. She said that she had decided some time earlier to start a home candle-making business in which she would have parties at people’s houses to sell her candles. She had bought a large amount of supplies at Canadian Tire to start the business, but there was one big wrinkle in her plan: she could not get people to host the parties. The woman apologized for not being able to pay her bill but said that she had no idea when she could pay, given the large amount of supplies she had on hand and with little prospect for parties.

Most of the time this is where the story would end. The agent would say she was sorry to hear about the woman’s plight and then admonish her to pay very soon. The agent might have even told a few people the story. She could easily be forgiven for not trying to win a customer for life. But few agents would have done what she did.

The next day she called the woman up and said, “I have been thinking about your situation, and I have an idea. We have several hundred people, mostly women, who work here at the call center. I’d like to organize a day where we have some candle parties during lunch times here at the center. I will put up fliers, talk up the party, and all you need to do is show up with your candles.”

A few weeks later they held the parties. Not only did the woman sell out most of her inventory, but many of the agents also said they’d like to hold parties in their homes. The day of parties at the call center launched the struggling business. The woman

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