1-800-FLOWERS.COM gets creative
“Everyone always says the customer is always right – which I think is a bunch of crap.” That might sound like an odd thing for a 1to1 Customer Champion to say, but Aaron Cano, Vice President of Customer Knowledge and Marketing Planning at 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, says it with a laugh.
“It’s cliché at this point,” he explains. “It really is. But the customer is not always right. It’s really about the customer experience. Everything that we do has to work toward improving the customer experience, and I try to live by that.”
Ordering flowers online or over the phone and having the correct order delivered on time sounds formulaic, but Cano says the company takes nothing for granted and is always looking to improve what it provides.
“For me personally, it’s about empowering creativity,” he says. “Giving our employees room to grow, letting them feel free to take risks, is important because unless we take risks we really don’t learn.”
As for the not-always-right customer, Cano says that occasionally someone will demand a level of service that the company simply cannot provide; it’s then his job to calmly and carefully alleviate the situation so that the customer leaves feeling satisfied. “You’re going to get some customers who don’t get the deliveries or things get screwed up for whatever reason, and we do everything we can to correct the situation and make sure the customer is satisfied with the response,” he says. “In more cases than not, our best customers, our most loyal, are the ones we’ve taken care of because they had an issue.”
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