Good Customer Service Follows You Into the Bathroom

Today’s organizations might be perpetually connected to their customers, but a good business knows when to respect boundaries. Cognizant that interactions must add value to the customer’s experience, a good business knows that attempting to communicate with a guarded, disinterested customer is not only inappropriate but counterproductive.

Pivotal to recognizing such boundaries is understanding how—and why—they come to exist. Standard business practice and societal conventions might provide good guidance, but they can never trump the will of the customer. If a customer is particularly private and particularly disinterested in an open communication link, a customer-centric business recognizes, accepts and adheres to his stricter set of boundaries.

Similarly, if a customer demonstrates an unusual aversion to boundaries and conversational restrictions, the business should feel free to engage with a corresponding absence of inhibition. In fact, its ability to call itself customer-centric might hinge on its ability to interact on the customer’s weird, unconventional terms.

Even if those terms involve a bathroom encounter.

Talk about "being where the customer is!"

Last month, a social media representative for Virgin Trains noticed a rather unusual—and unusually pressing—Tweet from passenger Adam Greenwood.

"I've just had a reasonably large poo and there is no toilet roll left on the @virgintrains 19.30 train from Euston to Glasgow pls send help," read the Tweet.

Publicly visible and irrefutably audacious, Greenwood’s Tweet left Virgin Trains with no choice to respond.

It did, however, retain the right to choose how it responded.

It could have dismissed Greenwood as an attention seeker and responded with something snarky. It could have accepted the legitimacy of Greenwood’s problem, apologized for the inconvenience and, in deference to societal conventions, promise to keep a fresher toilet paper stock in the future.

Instead, it went all in. It recognized the urgency of the problem, recognized that someone willing to Tweet about his bathroom emergency is not particularly guarded and recognized that the only appropriate response was action-oriented. It did not need to simply look "cool" and understanding on Twitter – it needed to provide this man with some toilet paper!

And quickly.

Within two minutes, a Virgin Trains representative with the initials MW was on the case. He asked Greenwood to identify the coach he was in; with that information, he was able to send an employee to the bathroom with some fresh toilet paper.

Satisfied with the support he received, Greenwood Tweeted his praises. He also detailed the experience in a recent BuzzFeed interview.

Having already proven it cares about its customers – and that its effort to please does not stop once the bathroom door closes – Virgin then took the opportunity to showcase its lightheartedness.

"We weren’t going to let this issue become #PooGate," boasted CB, another Virgin Trains social media representative.

When Greenwood later Tweeted that he would be again traveling via one of its trains, Virgin responded, "Maybe bring some loo roll. Just in case."

The Virgin Trains story makes for a fun read and good laugh, but it also provides a tangible example of how to satisfy customers in today’s digital age. The customer’s seemingly humorous issue presented Virgin Trains with a multitude of response options, and had it embarked on the wrong path, the story would have been one of public failure rather than charming success.

For starters, that a customer opted to Tweet about an urgent bathroom matter that required an urgent response speaks to the nature of the medium. The immediacy a customer expects when interacting on the phone or in a live chat room also exists on social media. Businesses, therefore, can no longer approach it from a lackadaisical, half-hearted perspective.

If the Virgin Trains team had not been actively following and quickly responding to all inbound Tweets, it would have stood no chance of effectively addressing this matter.

Other businesses must take note. Customers will use Twitter for urgent, conversational matters. When doing so, they will expect the business to take urgent action. To successfully satisfy today’s omni-channel customer, a business must be capable of meeting the demands of that urgency.

Once it chose to respond, the business then had to determine how to respond. While the customer’s BuzzFeed interview reflects his good humor about the situation, he was experiencing an actual bathroom challenge. Had Virgin treated the Tweet as a prank and offered a dismissive, snarky response, it would have trivialized a legitimate customer issue.

Responding with a serious tone—but refusing to venture into the bathroom—would have effectively been just as dismissive. The customer needed action; he did not simply need to be heard. If the business operated in accordance with standard boundaries – rather than the unique ones of a customer in a unique situation – it potentially would have shied away from the action that needed to be taken.

While few businesses will find themselves in this particular predicament, virtually all businesses will encounter scenarios in which standard norms, expectations and policies will prove insufficient. The mark of a customer-centric business comes from its ability to adapt to the specific needs of its customers.

Virgin Trains was willing to endure a very awkward and very unusual situation in the name of customer-centricity. Is your business willing to do the same?