From my very first visit to my many years living in the Seattle area, I’ve always found it endearing one could park on side streets facing either way. Well, Bellevue apparently doesn’t like this as I got a ticket for being “parked wrong way” on a perfectly legal spot. Don’t let Kirkland know as I park our truck the wrong way regularly.
Okay, lesson learned. I go online to pay the ticket and first the URL on the ticket is invalid, so I have to search the county website (no dropdown, you have to search) and then I see they charge $5 to pay by credit or debit card. They obviously aren’t in the customer service business.
- Make it easy for your customers to do business with you, especially to pay you!
- Don’t be like Comcast. Make it easy to get hold of you. The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about peoples’ irritation with chat bots and Comcast pushes every call, repeatedly, to using a chat bot.
- Provide value upfront, before someone’s a customer. Their attitude will be, wow, if he or she is so good now just wait until we’re working together.
The above is not hard. It just takes putting yourself in “customer mode.”
“The Lord gave us two ends, one to sit on and the other to think with. Success depends on which one we use the most.” Ann Landers
