Zachary Aldwin Milkshake in the Boardroom
I had another run in with them again this week and I think that it is worth sharing it with you. I got a bill for my water and rates on Thursday, I looked at it, noticed I had missed a payment and made a mental note to go and pay it at the weekend. I got home Friday night to find my water was cut off (yes I actually get running municipal water in my taps, and no you may not buy my house).

Fortunately my evening had been stupendous and I was basking in the afterglow of a great night, which kept me from blowing a fuse.
I did however think it was a little harsh for council to cut off supplies a day after I received my reminder to pay.
I checked the dates on my bill.

It was printed at the end of December, due date was mid January but it was postmarked end of January and I only received it early February. Someone in city of Harare billing had stuffed up by sitting on my bill instead of mailing it and though it was overdue I was suffering as a result of this.
I decided that I will deal with the issue first thing the next day.

As soon as I could, I pitched up at Rowan Martin Building, bill and payment in hand with a desire to settle my dues, but also to point out the billing cycle problem in the hope it would spare future aggravation.

My previous attempts at reasoning with City officials had been less than fruitful in past so it was with some pessimism that I approached the desk.
What a shock! The clerk was helpful. They were actually beyond helpful.

They do not do re-connections on a Saturday and normally I would have to wait till Monday.
But due to my bill error (and to avoid the possibly of me shouting at her) she went out of her way to find someone who could expedite the process.
An hour later I had running water. At no point did anyone ask for or even hint at the idea of squeezing a buck for this service, no solicitation for a bribe or lunch money.
What I received was service above and beyond the call of duty.

Now remember I was actually in the wrong here, I had missed a payment and the city was well in its rights to turn off my water and take their regular 48 hours to turn me back on.

That did not matter, what mattered was returning me to the point of a regular, paying customer that was satisfied with the service offered.
Do you love your customers?

Bestselling author Seth Godin said there are two ways people think about their customers: “We love our customers because they pay us money. (Inherent here is customers = money = love.)” or “We love our customers, and sometimes there’s a transaction.”

The second is very different indeed from the first. In the first case, customers are the means to an end, profit.
In the second, the organisation exists to serve customers, and profit is both an enabler and a possible side effect.

It’s easy to argue that without compensation, there can be no service. Today, in a world where the internet has made it easy to share information and in a country where word-of-mouth is a powerful tool, this is just not true.

If you hoard information, for example, today your prospective clients will simply click on a competitor’s website and find it somewhere else.
If you seek to charge above average prices for below average products, your customers will discover this, and let the world know.

In a free market with plenty of information, it’s very hard to succeed merely by loving the money your customers pay you.
Recently we were deciding on a marketing plan for our product and one of our insanely successful board members suggested that we get on a bus and go to every nearby city telling people about our new and innovative website that solves the “business connectivity and trust” issue on the continent.

The catch was our site hardly worked. You could barely do anything yet. We were running out of money, investors were pulling out.
Every Zimbabwean that we talked to sort of looked at us, nodded at our aspirations, and cringed.

An application that connected people based on trust didn’t seem to fit in their minds. So like I said, we went on the road, hoping that the people who didn’t sit behind big desks would understand.

Our budget was very small, so we had to figure out a way to charge people to come listen to us market our own product.
We set up a business conference and used our relationships. We did the setting up, the pouring of orange juice, the speaking, the question and answers.
We managed to get word out about the product. People were enthralled and we got standing ovations.

I’ll talk about the presentation that we made at the Holiday Inn in Mutare. The conference room was absolutely jammed.
It was right at the end of the day and someone in the crowd asked a question. “When can we get on the site and do what you’re explaining?”

I told him that it would be ready in two weeks. But two weeks was way too late. This person didn’t want it tomorrow and wasn’t going to care about it in two weeks they wanted it on that day.

In two weeks something else would have taken up his attention.
Why did we do this? We had packed conference rooms in six different cities (made more money off the conferences than the site ever did), but didn’t have a working product.
We went on television and radio all under the guise that it was better to get your name out there and get momentum, than to wait for a working product.

Two weeks later there was still no working site. People got upset, emails and phone calls started pouring in.
We didn’t execute well and because we were in Zimbabwe, I accepted the excuses of poor infrastructure, lack of capital from potential customers, and missed deadlines for “doing business in Africa.”

At the end of the day we could not offer the service we proclaimed and that people wanted. Would we do it again, of course, we would however make sure we have a working site before we set out.

People want to know they can trust you. As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for people is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organisation seeks.

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