In business, where there seemed to be firm earth there’s a gaping hole in the blink of an eye. All this begs several life strategies:

First, assume nothing, take nothing for granted, do not become too heavily reliant on any one thing, expect sudden change from day to day. Everything is thin ice.

Second, solidify your base. The one thing, the only thing you may be able to count on holding its value for you: your good customers. In the NO B.S. MARKETING LETTER, I talk about this as a “prime asset” you must safeguard, invest in and leverage.
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Where does much of the stress and irritation that accumulates during the work day that makes us tired and grumpy, that causes our frequent headaches come from?

Much of it develops from the little frictions and conflicts that occur all day long. Many of these can be eliminated with customer service diplomatic skill.

There is no doubt that we feel better when we get positive feedback. In transactional analysis the commonly used term is positive strokes. Sometimes these are even called warm fuzzies, the opposite by the way of cold pricklies.

A positive stroke can be like a mental hug. Anyone in a customer service position has great opportunity to stimulate this kind of desirable, pleasant, positive feedback. It’s easy to get it. All you have to do is give it. It is universal law that whatever we give out comes back to us multiplied.
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It’s important to remember that we live in a super stressed society. In big cities even in rural areas there are more causes of frustration and stress than ever before.

Remember when the national news was reporting a rash of incidents on the Los Angeles freeways with people locked in traffic jams losing their tempers with one another and actually pulling out guns and shooting each other.

Different people have different stress tolerance levels and can essentially snap into anger and rage when one last incident pushes them past their tolerance limit. Often a customer with a complaint may be close to that boiling point. Your customer service diplomacy can prevent him from boiling over. Doing so helps that person, helps you and helps your company.

You can tremendously improve your effectiveness at handling your customer with a complaint by reading this email a number of times so that the five success guidelines can become a part of your permanent memory.

Research has established that a message read or heard only once is 85% forgotten in about fifteen days but that same message read or heard twenty times in about thirty days is 85% remembered and impacts on a person’s thinking, speech and performance. This email can be used to program your mind through repetition to win in situations with customers with complaints.
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I want to talk with about why and how to go the extra mile as a customer service diplomat and to do so let me introduce an author… Doctor Napoleon Hill and an incredibly successful book, “Think and Grow Rich.”

Think and Grow Rich was first published in 1937 after twenty years research and it continues to periodically hit the best sellers list yet today, over sixty years later. That alone tells us that this is an unusually important book. In the book Doctor Hill presents proven success principles shared and used by hundreds of history’s greatest achievers. One of those principles is the idea of going the extra mile.

Doctor Hill once related a marvelous story about a little old lady entering a furniture store on a rainy day. Quickly judged by all the sales people on the floor as a non prospect just someone escaping the rain but one dumb, wet-behind-the ears rookie salesman went out of his way to be courteous and helpful to the lady. Of course he failed to make a sale and was the brunt of much kidding by the seasoned old pros.

Not long after the incident billionaire Andrew Carnegie contacted the store and insisted that this particular salesman be sent to Scotland to take orders for new furnishings for the Carnegie family castle. The little old lady had been Carnegie’s mother. By going the extra mile and extending true customer service diplomacy even to a non customer this salesman became an overnight superstar.
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