…is caring for your customers.
During the ‘day’ job, I spend a lot of time getting to know my customers. Part of this makes good business sense – how can I make a recommendation on a solution without understanding their business? But part of it is just personal and ‘just the way I am.’
This can be lovely – being shown pictures of new grandchildren, getting offered bits of birthday or wedding cake (path to this geek’s heart = cake), children drawing me pictures while I work. I don’t make a deliberate effort to remember what is going on in the lives of my customers, you just cannot help but keep up-to-date.
Sometimes it can be hard. Couples breaking up is always tricky – who gets custody of the geek? Clients get ill or their businesses struggle. Fortunately, the good news normally outnumbers the bad.
And sometimes it can be horrible – I visited a client this afternoon who, last time I saw them, had been visiting their partner in hospital. I asked after him and sadly, he had passed away. I could see the tears welling up in my client’s eyes – and, as a few memories came back, I could feel them starting in my own!
In the past few months, three of my clients, or their loved ones, have been lost to cancer. In today’s case it was ten weeks from diagnosis to death, in another one week and in the third, many long, battling years.
Give a bit back
If any of the posts on this blog have helped you solve a problem (over 1,000 people read my post on fixing Google toolbar problems in Firefox 5), or just made you smile, please think about making a little donation to the Teenage Cancer Trust.
A Microsoft Certified Professional with many years of large corporate experience and training, he now focuses on helping small businesses make the most of their IT.
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