Your Company Writes Stories Every Day

Years ago I bought a TV branded as Westinghouse. Three months later I was watching my Westinghouse TV when it stopped working. It just turned off as if I had hit the power button on the remote by mistake. So I did all the things you do when something like this happens. I tried different outlets, tried holding down the power button for various lengths of time. Nothing.

Like most appliance-type things, the TV came with a large piece of shiny cardstock paper that read “STOP. Do Not Return This TV To The Store.” The shiny piece of cardstock included a phone number to call if you had any trouble with the TV. I called the number. After being on hold for 30 minutes listening to a recording that encouraged me over and over again to visit a customer support website for help, I hung up the phone and went to the website. The website encouraged me to call the phone number.

This was back in the day when you could Tweet at a company and they might respond so I Tweeted at Westinghouse. After a few days they replied, asking me to send my contact information via private message, which I did. After several more days, exactly nothing happened. A little online research revealed that I was not alone. Apparently, the brand “Westinghouse” ain’t what it used to be and lots of people have had the same TV problem.

I tried calling Westinghouse again and did manage to reach a very nice person in some faraway land who read from a script. They shared some suggestions for trying to “reboot” the TV, none of which worked. Then they asked me to email a picture of my receipt and they would get back to me with next steps. Next steps?

Turns out the next steps were making arrangements to have the TV repaired. How long would that take? It depends. I told them I had no interest in having a three-month-old TV repaired, I wanted it replaced.  At that point the circular scripted responses went into overdrive and eventually I asked to speak to a manager. I was put on hold and after 20 minutes I hung up.

I’d bought the TV at Target and despite the shiny piece of cardstock paper that said “STOP” and despite the fact that our receipt said we only had 30 days to return the TV, my partner gave Target a call just to see. I was in another room and just two minutes after she told me she was going to call I could hear her laughing. Laughing. On the phone with Target, laughing. After she hung up she told me I could take the TV back to Target and ask for Larry.

I didn’t have the box so I zip-tied the cord and the remote and headed to Target. While I stood in line at customer service holding a TV with no box I could see the customer service person had seen me and was not thinking “I can’t wait to talk to this guy.” They smiled, nevertheless, when reached the counter and I put their mind at ease as fast as I could by blurting out “Larry told me to bring you this TV.”

Because the purchase was more than 30 days old they had to call Larry who was wearing a tie, which, at Target, means you’re El Jefe. He smiled the “I’ve-been-expecting-you” smile and told the cashier how to work around the receipt issue and within moments I was holding a Target gift card. I went to the electronics department and picked out a new, more expensive, not Westinghouse, television. Not only that, I also picked up some other items around the store while I was there.

As I pushed my cart to the checkout I passed the customer service desk and when they saw me I pointed to the TV to, you know, let them know I didn’t use the gift card for beer. They smiled a “I-hope-he-doesn’t-invite-us-to-Thanksgiving-dinner” smile.

Of course, Westinghouse is no longer really Westinghouse and hasn’t been Westinghouse for a long time. Westinghouse is really CBS or Viacom, or who knows what. The Westinghouse brand is licensed out by the “Westinghouse Licensing Corporation.” Basically, my Westinghouse TV was the brand equivalent of Star Wars grape jelly. I know that things happen in companies and organizations, things not always under the control of the people I’m holding accountable. But product aside, the reason I will never try another Westinghouse branded product is about how I was treated.

Westinghouse Digital owed me something and, technically, Target owed me nothing. Westinghouse made it difficult to find a solution. Target found a solution in less than three minutes on the phone. The person on the phone representing Westinghouse had zero authority to make me happy. Larry at Target had all the authority he needed to make me happy.

I can’t imagine that Larry was ever asked to justify his actions but if his answer to any such inquiry was “I increased loyalty in that customer,” he wouldn’t be wrong.

I learned this lesson long ago working at Nordstrom, where I was empowered, as a lowly shoe salesperson, to do whatever it took to make my customers happy. On more than one occasion, I had a customer come in on Friday afternoon and buy a $200 pair of patent leather tuxedo shoes, only to return them on Sunday because “they didn’t fit right.” I knew, and the customer knew I knew, that he had worn those shoes to some fancy event on Saturday night. But Nordstrom didn’t pay me to be a detective. Nordstrom didn’t pay me to monitor the margins or road-block loss. They paid me to make people happy.

Nordstrom, 1901

There were limits. On rare occasions a customer who regularly abused the return policy was invited by the store manager to no longer be a customer. But 99% of the time—as explained to me by my boss and mentor— my job was to create good stories.

“If a customer doesn’t leave with a good story,” he said, “we haven’t done our job.”

I wasn’t a great shoe salesperson in terms of volume. I was okay, but not great. Humble brag warning, but I spent too much time with each customer, talking about shoes and proper fit and leather and dyes and this slow turnover, combined with my reluctance to up sale, kept me in the middle of the pack in terms of sales. When I mentioned this to my boss he told me that I would always have a job with him because I was what people thought of when they thought of Nordstrom.

He needed the people who sold a lot of shoes. They created revenue. He valued the people who created an experience customers would talk about. They created new customers.

Long before I could even conceive of Chief Storyteller as a job title, I was taught that creating good stories was critical to business success. Eventually, I learned that creating bad stories can also be critical to business fails if not necessarily the failure of a business.

Whenever you’re working with a customer directly, or indirectly through marketing and messaging, I think it’s a good idea to think about the story you’re participating in at that moment and your role in moving the story forward. What is the story your customer is going to tell about you at the end of the day?