Mike Klinger guest blogger: “Maybe I’m the A*s H*le!”
March 5, 2010
Okay now you’re thinking – “What kind of a blog is this going be? – he’s cursing already!” I’ll get back to that in a moment.
A quick intro: I am the co-owner of Tree Falls Post/Clonetown. I’ve been in the post biz for over 22 years now, started as a post sound editor/mixer. Over the years, I’ve evolved into full video and audio post production entrepreneur along with my wife D.D. As an occasional guest of D.D.’s blog, I won’t have the poetic, artful approach that she does. I’m the pragmatic, tech minded part of this team.
Back to my topic: “Maybe I’m the A*s H*le!” which I’ll abbreviate as “AH.”
Several years ago, a well-known voice over talent told me an anecdotal story: When he was a teen, he came home in a grumpy mood from a particularly rough day and complained to his father about his bad day. He explained that he had run into one person after another and for whatever reason everyone that day seemed to be an AH. His father listened patiently and then said “Son, if you go about your day and you run into an AH, then that person probably is an AH. But if you go about your day and everyone is an AH, then more than likely, YOU, son are the AH.”
How true that seems to rings with me in some experiences we’ve all had as customers. How often do we run into some situation where we feel like we are being punished for being a customer? Recently, I was dealing with some web hosting issues and had to move our domains to a new company. In the process, one of the domains didn’t transfer properly. In getting some tech support from the old company I was emailed a lengthy PDF troubleshooting document. When that didn’t seem to help, I asked for more help and the response from their support department was that I hadn’t thoroughly read the information and that the answer was on page 6, paragraph 2 line 7. In fewer words they could have said what they knew but wouldn’t simply tell me: “It’s likely that your contact email isn’t up to date on that domain.”
What this said to me was “look AH, this is such an annoying question that we get hundreds of times of day, and if you weren’t such an AH you would have thoroughly read the 10 page PDF and your question would be answered. And I’m thinking, if this is such a re-occurring question that it has become an annoyance to you — then maybe you haven’t effectively presented the info or made it easy enough to your customers?
It’s life experiences like this which make me strive in every way possible not to be on the AH side of the human dynamics of customer service. We feel that we have been extremely thoughtful at Tree Falls about every aspect of our operation. Our team does a great job being as friendly and easy as possible to work with. From an operational point of view — we hope not bog you down with a lot of rules, policies, exceptions, punishment fees, or laborious reading, when a quick verbal answer might serve better. We hope you find us great to work with and if you aren’t a customer yet, please give us a try and see how great our work and our customer service is.
Tree Falls Post is a full service audio and video post facility. Visit Tree Falls at: www.tfpost.com
Clonetown is a high definition dubbing and transfer facility. Visit Clonetown at: www.clonetownHD.com
