Over the past four decades, I’ve worked with customers who purchase products and services from communication companies.  One of the most important things I’ve learned from working with these companies and customers is what I call the “canoe approach” to customer service.  It isn’t just a cute saying.  It is a solid approach that takes the customer relationship to a deeper level.  It works well when followed by a single employee.  But the real value of this approach hits home when any entire company lives by it.  The canoe approach gives everyone in the vendor company – even sales and marketing – a way to put some muscle behind the hype.  It presumes that to have a really good customer relationship, your customers need to know you’re there with them when they’re working on tough problems and trying to resolve their company issues.  You are really in the canoe with them.

The work I do at IQ Services gives me an opportunity to apply the canoe approach quite often.  As you know, we offer load testing services. Because the systems we test are often already in production, we must test late at night or early in the morning to reduce impact on real end-user callers. This means that a test might be running from midnight to 5AM.  The canoe approach means that IQ Services is there with the customer throughout all those hours of testing and tuning and retesting.  It means my colleagues (often times a Project Manager and Test Engineer) are there to look out for our customer’s best interests and to help them address whatever problems might arise.  It also means that as a salesperson, I should be there sometimes for the test as well even though our project implementation experts can handle it without me.  The value of my presence isn’t necessarily realized during the wee hours of the night, but rather the next morning when I have chance to talk to the customer.  They know I was there and understand what happened and that I’m there again in the morning to continue helping them solve their issues.

As a salesperson, I’ve always found that customers respect you and depend on you much more when you are in the canoe with them during difficult times.  But when a customer feels like an entire vendor company is in the canoe with them…well that’s priceless.

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Gregg Williams