I had awards made for some of our Collegewise counselors and asked to have them shipped (the awards, not the counselors) to Austin for our company meetup. Two of the awards came out of the box with chipped corners. The damage was minor but it did take some of the luster off the recipients’ shiny recognitions.

I emailed the company, explained what happened, and asked if they would reship some replacements (at no charge to me). I expected that they would either quote a policy about how they weren’t responsible for damage during shipping, or that they would ask me to first send the damaged awards back to them.

I was really surprised and happy when I got an email reply within 24 hours that said only, “Sure, Kevin. Where would you like them shipped?”

No quoting of policies. No need to escalate a case to a manager. No lengthy forms I had to fill out that made me spend more of the time I shouldn’t have to spend—just one person on the front lines who was empowered to do what needed to be done to make it right. It was so refreshing.

Whether you’re a private counselor, a school administrator, the leader of a student club, or anyone else with customers or constituencies, the best customer service policy is actually the most simple:

1. Put smart, caring people on the front lines to talk with customers.
2. Let them use those traits to make customers happy, without scripts or phone trees or anything else that just dumbs them down and makes an unhappy customer more upset.

Don’t say “Your call is very important to us.” Don’t talk about customer satisfaction in a mission statement. Don’t pay lip service to service. Just let good people actually be good to customers.

It’s one of those things that’s simple until you make it complicated.

And thanks, Zazzle, for helping me out.