It’s important to always be on your game. Building your credibility and reputation takes years. But in in just a matter of minutes, you can shred it to scraps for the trash bin.

My wife and I have been customers of a certain “red check” cellular provider for almost 20 years. We’ve been feeding the ridiculous profits of this corporate titan for longer than most of their new customers have even been alive. And for the most part, they’ve been true to their word and provided the service we expected for the price we were paying.

But over the last two months I’ve been on the verge of waving goodbye on multiple occasions. It’s so dang frustrating. Because in the past 8-weeks I’ve been on the phone with these folks no less than 15 hours of time. At night, during the day, on weekends. And as I sit here today, they still have not resolved the issue, though I’ve been assured by half-a-dozen “customer representatives” and two “supervisors” that all is in order.

Pfffffttt!!!!

A number of years back, my wife and I split our phone lines into two separate accounts. With the growth of our kids, and managing all their phones in high school, we needed some separation of the business phones from the family phones. The splitting was easy. You know, more money for them.

But now that the kids are gone and pay their own bills, the putting back together of our joint bill is proving to be a tremendous challenge. We no longer have a need for separate accounts and frankly I’d like to save the money and hassle by putting both her phone and mine on one bill. Who knew this would be such a Herculean task. In hindsight, we should have just cancelled our accounts and started over. It would have been less painful.

Unfortunately the saga is not done yet so today I’m just glad my phone rings, because for a short period of time, it actually didn’t. So, I’m sorry if I missed your call. It wasn’t on purpose.

I mention all of this only to point out that you should never, ever take your customers for granted. Just because you have worked with them for two decades doesn’t mean you can’t still mess it all up. Every interaction with customers is like a new opportunity to sell yourself. If you forget that, and fail at your customer service, it begins to chip away at a trust relationship that’s grown over time. Yes, you’ve done a bit to earn their loyalty, but they don’t owe it to you and you aren’t entitled to keep it “just because.”

I believe long-term customers want to give you the benefit of the doubt in such a failing. They believe in you, and for years you’ve not let them down, or if you did, you worked hard to make things right. But even your best customers only have so much patience.

As we gather for our annual Expo in this, the 70th year anniversary of our organization’s founding, I want to first thank all of you for being our customers. I want you to know that we appreciate you, that we are grateful for you. We do not take for granted the trust you have placed in us.

On that note, we are going to try our best to give you yet another great NASGW Expo and Annual Meeting experience and we’re really looking forward to once again host you in Columbus, Ohio. All the last minute details are coming together and when you arrive next week, we’ll be ready for you.

If you need anything before or during your time at the Expo, please let us know. We’ll do our very best to make it a show you’ll be glad you came to. We understand you’re making a commitment to be with us. And because we know how important it is, our commitment to you is top-notch customer service. You deserve nothing less.

We’ll see you in Columbus for the 2023 NASGW Expo and Annual Meeting!

Until then,