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Everybody makes mistakes in business, and most savvy business owners will do whatever they can to make it better for the customer. Bill Schodowski, who heads up Delaware Valley Wholesale Florist's national sales development, did that – and then made a full confession to his entire Delaware Valley Floral Group customer base about how, as he put it, “we screwed up . . . and lived to tell about it.”
It's a great example of how a business can use a potentially disastrous situation to reinforce its professionalism and ability to really serve customers. Here’s the story he tells in his weekly e-mail to the Delaware Valley Wholesale Florist customers:
Less than a week ago, I never knew Nic Faitos. Nic is the owner of Starbright Floral Designs in NYC. However, in an effort to learn a little bit more about the Special Event business, I had the opportunity to email Nic with some survey questions. Nic responded promptly and gave me a lot of detail and insight on how to be a better provider in the world of special events.
On Friday morning, I took a call from Nic… from Athens, Greece…where he happened to be vacationing! Nic needed to inform me that our promised flowers for a Saturday bride were not in his shop in NYC… as promised. Nic, to his credit, was truly professional (much more than I probably would have been). But he was correct… these are things that heavily influence the decision of who to do business with. I got off the phone and checked with the sales rep, Jason Edmonds, and got a feel for what was missing. It turned out that due to the Memorial Day weekend, the truck that was to arrive on Thursday…was not going to be at the distribution point until Friday afternoon. In the words of Maxwell Smart….”we missed it by that much.”
I put a call into Gus, Starbright’s flowerbuyer… and the guy who would be highly visible to a highly incensed and irritated bride come Saturday morning. Gus shot me a quick email identifying the flowers that he absolutely needed for the event.
Jason put an “all points bulletin” on the truck and found that it was going to arrive in Sewell, NJ around 12.30pm on Friday afternoon. DV’s John Richards assembled a team that broke the truck down in record time and had Starbright’s product speeding to DVFG’s distribution center in Edison, NJ for a 3.00pm arrival. If locating, identifying and transferring floral product was an Olympic event…we would have qualified in our weight class.
Gus was kind enough to send a driver to meet our truck in Edison, NJ from NYC. To those of you who live in the rural areas of this great country…you can’t begin to realize how problematic this whole event was. DVFG’s Sandy Helfrich, who’s shift was to end at 4pm, stayed around until 5.30 p.m. to make certain that all product was located and moved to Starbright’s trucks.
In the end…the bride had a great wedding on Saturday morning and didn’t even have an inkling on what the previous 24 hours looked like.
So why do I bring this up? Besides being a masochist…I think that this showcases the efforts that we will take to safeguard our customer’s customer. “No, we can’t help you…it’s a trucking issue” would have been an easy answer to give to Nic and Gus. But if we are going to talk about “Ritz Carlton” type treatment…we had better learn to “walk the walk.”
. . . I had a mentor once that told me to “pray for problems”. When I looked at him like he had two heads…he explained…your customers expect you to do the normal stuff. What will separate you from the pack is how you perform on the extremely difficult stuff!
As Bill said, Nic was very gracious about the whole experience -- but not all customers are quite as gracious with the "difficult stuff." For tips on keeping your cool (and the customer) in those situations, check out "Hot, Bothered, and Always Right," in Floral Management's May issue.
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Sales, Profit Builders 
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