When it comes to generating excellent customer service, most people are under
the impression that the customer is the only thing that matters.
Trudy Adams, director of customer service and sales for Cleaner’s Supply in Conklin, NY, respectfully disagrees.
“People always say, ‘The customer comes first. The customer is most important.’ Absolutely not,” she emphasized.
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With about two decades of customer service experience under her belt, Trudy is
quite savvy on the subject. Combine that wisdom with a spunky, outgoing
personality and you have a person perfectly suited to work directly with other
people. Or, in some cases, work directly in front of other people.
It’s no mystery why Trudy has been an extremely popular industry speaker in the
past handful of years. She always has plenty of insightful things to say about
customer service, and she says it with a smile that is as sincere as it is
larger than life.
However, she almost had another calling. Originally she seemed destined for a
life a little less flashy.
Trudy was born and raised in Endicott, NY, the town where IBM was established in
1906. It is often referred to as the “birthplace of computers.”
“My family was an IBM family,” Trudy recalled. “IBM was founded in Endicott, and really, everyone in my family worked for IBM
except me. Actually, I worked for IBM for a very short period of time. I
started doing computer science and I got an internship working at IBM, and it
was not what I wanted to do. I mean, working in front of a computer is one
thing, but actually doing code and writing programs… could you see me doing that?”
As a former captain of her high school dance team with a deep, enthusiastic love
of life, it certainly didn’t seem like a good fit.
Instead, motherhood proved to be. Trudy, who was married by 19, raised her sons
Maxwell and Gregory until they were old enough to go to school.
“Then I started working part-time in the evenings,” she said. “I had just started that because I wanted some stimulation around other people.”
She was hired by Wegman’s, the 73-store regional supermarket chain with locations in New York,
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland. In 2007 and 2008, the company
was ranked by Fortune as the third best company to work for in the United
States.
In fact, Wegman’s has appeared on the publication’s annual “100 Best Companies to Work For” every year since the list was first created in 1998.
Originally, Trudy worked at the deli counter, but it didn’t take long for her to become a full-time employee climbing her way up the
ranks.
“Wegman’s customer service is bar none,” she noted. “They just train you constantly in customer service. I just loved their
philosophy. Everything is spotless. Everything is all catered to the customer.
I loved the environment.”
Over time, Trudy took advantage of the company’s numerous training opportunities and became well-versed in the art of
satisfying customers.
Eventually, she joined a team of Wegman’s employees who specialized in opening new stores, doing whatever it took to
make them successful.
“My role, basically, was to walk around and talk to the customers and find out
what they liked and didn’t like. We were really more interested in what they didn’t like because in the evening we would all get together and we’d talk about the comments that the customers were making. Then, we decided if
things needed to be changed or not.”
What impressed Trudy the most was how quickly Wegman’s top brass would instigate the changes that her team recommended.
“When they opened the one store in Princeton, customers were walking out of the
store,” she said. “Their grocery carts were full of groceries and they were just walking out. They
all used American Express. You’re talking about an area where the average income is over $100,000 a year. They
didn’t use any other credit cards. They said, ‘If you’re not going to take American Express, we’re not going to shop here anymore’.”
Up to that point of time, Wegman’s had been against using American Express because of the high fees they charged.
However, that philosophy changed overnight.
“Literally the next day, American Express was in that store with manual things
that you slip your card through in order to charge the credit card. I can tell
you that half of them weren’t working,” she laughed. “But, that’s how fast they reacted to the customers. They would listen to the customers and
react to what it was that they needed to do in each area.”
For about a decade, Trudy continued to enjoy her job at Wegman’s with no intention of ever leaving. When a recruiter from a mysterious unnamed
company sought her out, she politely declined.
However, the recruiter refused to give up. After a couple of months she sat down
with him and heard an in-depth sales pitch.
“I said, ‘Will you please tell me what the name of the company is?’ He goes, ‘It’s Cleaner’s Supply,’” she recalled. “And I laughed at him.”
Wegman’s had a firm hold on Trudy, but eventually she became sold on Cleaner’s Supply when she spoke to the business’s owner, Jeff Schapiro, at length numerous times.
Finally, about ten years ago, she was hired to be the supply company’s customer service manager. Trudy was impressed with the company’s positive customer service attitude and its overall tenacity and
innovativeness, qualities it possessed from the get-go.
“Jeff actually was a drycleaner. His entire family was in the business for many
years,” Trudy explained. “Jeff actually owned a drycleaners and Cleaner’s Supply started in the basement of it.
“In the very beginning, because there weren’t a lot of calls coming in at that time and he was still running the cleaners,
one of his pressers was actually one of the reps who would take the calls
coming in. He had a light bulb rigged up so when the phone would ring it would
flash. He would run upstairs to take the order.”
The cleaning supply company has grown considerably since it started in 1992. It
now employs about 100 people at its Conklin facility. It also has a West Coast
distribution center in Reno, NV.
Whenever Trudy talks about customer service, she does so with a lot of passion.
She sees it as an all-encompassing process.
“Customer service is really what every single one of us does in this company,” she explained. “Everything that we do, every job that everyone is doing is something for the
customer, whether it’s purchasing — buying to make sure we have enough products to sell so there are no back orders
— or whether it’s making sure all of the boxes are shipped out every day to hit same day
service. Every single thing that we do here serves as a customer service
function.”
In order to achieve unforgettable customer service, though, it is also important
to create an emotional bond with the customer.
“One of the things that I say all the time is customer service is supposed to
break the rules,” she said. “We’re supposed to be able to meet those exceptions, whatever it takes to make that
customer happy.”
Sometimes “whatever it takes” simply means being honest whenever you make a mistake.
“We do things wrong,” she said. “Thank God a customer will call us and tell us when something does go wrong. They
don’t need to call us if we’ve made them upset. But, the ones who do and tell us, we really try our best to
fix the situation as quickly and painlessly as possible. We’re not perfect, but we try very, very hard.”
Sometimes, “whatever it takes” could also mean solving a problem that you did not even create.
“Just because you didn’t make a mistake doesn’t mean you don’t have to fix it,” she added. “Somehow you have to let the customer know: ‘I’m so sorry. Let me see what I can do for you to fix that.’ These little abnormal things that come up really should be handled immediately
and you should do everything that you possibly can to ‘wow’ that customer. Make them go: ‘Wow. I can’t believe that they went so far above and beyond for me.’ That is going to spread like wildfire.”
As an example, Trudy spoke of a conference she attended where one speaker told a
familiar story.
“She got up and was going on about how the drycleaners ruined her pants and
wouldn’t pay for it,” she recalled. “Then, at the very end, she talked about how she went to another cleaners and
they were so nice. They even gave her a lint roller with a holiday wrap around
it.”
Not surprisingly, the lint roller was one that Cleaner’s Supply had sold to them. When Trudy informed her of the fact, the lady gave
her a big hug.
Then, Trudy said to her: “I completely understand about what happened, and on behalf of the drycleaning
industry, please understand that that is not the norm. And, if you want more
holiday lint rollers, just let me know because we get lots of them every year.”
