Vox Fortis Communications

A few weeks ago, I received one of the most generous gifts I’d ever gotten from a client. Technically, he isn’t even MY client. I do some work for a virtual marketing agency, and he’s their client. He had a humdinger of a online PR problem, and a small team of us cleaned it up for him. Business as usual, we were happy, birds were singing, dogs and cats played together nicely, etc. He wrote us a very nice email saying he’d love to take us out to dinner, upon which he had to be unfortunately reminded that we’re a virtual team. (We were immensely bummed.)

Then a box showed up on my front step, and I stared at it blankly for a few moments. It was fairly heavy and I recognized the name on the return address, but couldn’t figure out for the life of me what was being sent. I opened it up, and discovered a VERY nice bottle of red wine, and a gift card for 100 smackers to Ruth’s Chris steak house. I was totally floored.

There are a few lessons we can take from this, kids:

Saying “thanks” means a lot.

He didn’t have to send our team squat. He hired us to help him out and we did, but there are goodies of note on both sides of this equation. First, on the agency side, we delivered a lot faster than what we’d set up his expectation to be. (Frankly, I think we surprised ourselves, too!) We set the bar at a reasonable level and then blew the sucker out of the water.

On the client side, it reminds us that even if we work for ourselves and pay others in that endeavor, we need to say thank you sometimes. We are always a client to someone. Maybe it’s just when you’re picking up kitty litter at the grocery store, but when the checkout lady smiles and remembers your cat’s name, that’s pretty damned great customer service.

He is building loyalty.

I’m not saying that any client is more important that another. Service should be given regardless, because they’re all clients that want your expertise. But guess what? If he calls in a panic at 2am and wants to know where to locate the most expensive Happy Meal ever, guess who will be willing to drag herself out of bed and start combing the Internet? The girl who is groggy because she had some of the wine this client sent, that’s who.

Have you said thank you lately?

When I thought about it, this was quite a production for him. There were about 4 of us that work on his account regularly. He’s never met but one of us in person. How on earth does one even figure out what to get a group of people like that? Somehow he did. He took the time to figure out that there is a Ruth’s Chris steakhouse in my area. He took the time to pick out a great bottle of wine. He got them assembled into one package, got my address and had it mailed out in a pretty quick manner.

We took time in our day to work on his account because that’s our job. He took time out of his day to say thank you for doing it well.

With the holidays coming up, ’tis the season for saying thank you, even if it’s something you paid for to begin with. Besides, you never know when it might come in handy to have hired someone who could tell you what it costs to watch the wildebeest migration from a hot air balloon.

And if you need them to find out at 2am, it helps if you’ve recently told that someone “thank you” for the work they’ve done before.