Businesses run on trust — story of the coconut seller and her customer commitment

It was the auspicious Krishna Janmashtami day and I happened to be in Bangalore during that time.

Since its usually fasting for me, I wanted to have some coconut water from a street side seller and decided to stop by on the way.

I love Bangalore street side coconut sellers and the fresh cool drink that you get there.

I stopped by the nearest lady selling tender coconut and asked her for a tender coconut which will have more water since I needed it to be a filling one.

She nodded but handed a relatively smaller one, so my immediate reaction was this is going to have less water.

She responded back immediately with all her confidence that Madam this will be good if it has less water then I will give you another free.

It made no difference to me since it sounded one usual sales pitch.

I tried it and to my disappointment I was right and it had very little water as expected.

I gave her a sad look and she understood, then she immediately picked up a much bigger one more from her hip of coconuts and started cutting one more for me.

I kept resisting but she would not listen and she had cut it by then and insisted I have it.

This one was quite good and when I handed over the money for 2 she returned me half keeping only for one coconut.

Honestly I didn’t want her to bear the loss for me and I felt they do quite a hard job whole day so its not worth taking it free from her.

I kept insisting and requesting her to take the money but she tried telling me that since she had promised me a good one and failed on her promise on the first one she cant take money from me for the second one.

I was amazed by the commitment an illiterate coconut seller had for her customer.

I had lot of respect for her for the way she kept her words without feeling tempted by the money in spite of the daily struggle that they go through.

How many established business can exhibit such value and commitment to customer.

I salute you; you are my inspiration and hero.

Some similar incidents from Adaptive which shows our commitment to customers

Scenario 1

6th Sep night one of our customer tries to make a payment using our website. Since the website is going through a transition to a new domain he could not locate the payments page and came on our live chat and asked for the payment link.

One of my colleagues who was handling the live chat that day was under pressure since there were few other customers also on chat with her. In the hurry of the moment she gave a payment link of one of the more expensive products and the customer who was unaware also paid for the product.

It came to my notice that he has paid $550 more than what he should have paid for, of course the mistake was on our part.

My clear instruction to the team was I will personally write an apology mail to him and get the amount refunded first and only then proceed with any other formalities.

I wrote a mail to him at that moment and waited for him to respond.

Called him around 8.30 AM first thing to fix this and got him to share his financial details.

Needless to say the extra amount of money paid was refunded to him within few hours he was given some more goodies as well as a goodwill gesture.

He was clearly sounding happy with all this and thanked me many times.

Scenario 2

A customer from Australia writes to us, talks to us about our CBAP program offerings.

In couple of his communications he requested to us for a better price and pleaded that the price is on the higher side.

We have a very firm no discount policy that we maintain, except repeat customer discount.

Our sales team tried convincing the offerings and why we don’t compromise on the quality nor on the price.

We usually give some demo material and a 1 hour live demo class to see and evaluate what they are buying.

It makes sense rather than we saying its great, they see what they are buying.

Post the demo class he calls back saying he wants to enroll; now he is ready to pay the usual price. When one of our sales manager asks about the demo class experience he says I know your classes are best since I have taken your classes earlier in BABoK v2 but could never go for exams due to my priorities.

I know your faculty and class content that’s why came back to you guys without checking out any where else.

So now we get to know that he is a repeat customer who has come back but he never told this earlier and immediately he was given the repeat customer discount.

And he was quite happy that we gave the discount when he was least expecting it.

That’s when we explained him the entire process and why he was given a discount.

We explained him what our customers mean to us and how we are an extremely customer success oriented organization.

My clear communication to my team has been any thing to do with customer/prospect and reputation of the organization its always to be taken with highest priority.

Businesses run on trust, what do you say, be it grocery, Amazon or your ISP we buy trust.

Do you agree?

If customer success or engagement is not one of the KPIs of the business then its not built to last