When Hugh Harris answered his phone, a woman was furious that the siding Dixie HomeCrafters had installed nine years ago had faded from brown to pink.
The $110 million home improvement company has a 100 percent guarantee on its work, but he vividly remembered that she wanted a color they didn’t carry, so he reluctantly used a product he didn’t like to meet her wants.
But instead of an “I told you so,” he wanted to stand by the company’s promise. He tracked down the company that had acquired the faulty siding maker, and it agreed to provide new, quality product if he provided the labor. So an entire $18,000 job got replaced at no cost to the customer.
“They sent me a letter thanking me and couldn’t believe that we actually stood behind what we said we wanted to do nine years later on such a large job, but that’s what we do — we take care of our customers,” the CEO says.
Smart Business spoke with Harris about how to build customer relationships.
Stay true to your word. It’s just straight business. I’ve worked my business philosophy my whole life like this — do what you say you’re going to, do it when you say you’re going to do it, and it makes for a good situation for both parties. You don’t have to lie, cheat and make things sound better than they actually are as long as you have good stuff to begin with. Just follow through.
That’s all people want nowadays — give them a fair shake. Tell them what you’re going to do. Then you go do it. We do our business a little bit different than most contractors do. It doesn’t matter if the job is $2,000 or $50,000, we don’t take any money upfront and nobody in the middle (does either). Our customers, they pay us when they’re 100 percent satisfied with the job. It ensures good quality work from my contractor who does the job because nobody gets paid until that customer is happy. It’s just the old-fashioned way of doing business really.
Be active in customer service. No matter what your title is or how big your company is, go out and actually go on the street yourself and go to your customer’s home and look at a job that you’ve actually completed and interview the customer. Even if you don’t sell the customer something, at least do a follow-up call to see how courteous your salesperson was and make sure that they cover all the bases and try to figure out, if they didn’t sell, why, and if they did sell, why. If they did sell, let the job be completed and go out and look at it. Check what you expect.
