At Your Service: Taking Them to the Cleaners May 30, 2007
It's not enough that Kirk Harney, vice president of sales for Capital Press, a printer in Los Angeles, is willing to bring proofs to his clients rather than have them come to him. Harney will also run personal errands for them if it means keeping a customer happy. Recently when Harney needed a client, who works at an insurance company, to proof some materials before printing, he agreed to bring the copy to her. But when Harney showed up, "I could tell she was flustered," he says, recalling that the customer was on the phone with her husband complaining that she didn't have time to finish her work and run to the dry cleaners on the way home. The customer, he says, was desperate to pick up a dress for a function she was attending that night. Harney's solution? He would run to the cleaners for her and bring her clothes back to her if she would look at the copy in the meantime. Harney took a blank check from the woman, drove 30 minutes to pick up the dry cleaning and returned the dress to her office.
Harney, who also once helped a client pick up and deliver a TV to her home from an electronics store one Saturday on a moment's notice, says helping customers in such unusual ways isn't an uncommon practice for him. "I would do it anyway, but it never hurts," he says. "It's a nice way to cement a relationship."
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