We have a yard cat. His name is Forklift. He showed up in 2017, decided he lived here, and has been here ever since.
I think he's taught me as much about customer service as any of the courses we've taken.
The first lesson: presence matters
Forklift is not a useful cat. He doesn't catch mice (we don't have mice). He doesn't do tricks. He doesn't interact with the wash bay in any meaningful way. What he does is show up at the front gate every business day morning and sit on the bollard until somebody pets him.
Customers see him before they see anybody else. They pet him. They smile. They come into the office in a better mood than they otherwise would have.
The total value of that presence per year is probably $4,000–$8,000 in customer goodwill. The cost is some kibble and an annual vet visit.
The second lesson: don't try to manage what shouldn't be managed
For about six months in 2018 we tried to manage Forklift. We bought him a bed. We tried to put him in the office. We tried to keep him off the trucks.
He didn't comply with any of this. He kept doing what he was doing, which was apparently the optimal Forklift policy from the beginning. We stopped managing him.
A lot of customer service is like this. There are interactions that work because they're authentic, and trying to systematize them makes them worse. The best customer service moments at the yard are when DeShawn explains a wash decision to a curious customer, or when Sara walks somebody through a routing constraint. These don't show up in any training manual.
The third lesson: the small thing isn't small
A customer mentioned at year-end last year that our yard cat is the reason they keep buying from us. They were half-joking, but only half. The cat created a moment of warmth in what would otherwise have been a transactional visit.
We're an industrial business. Most of what we do is industrial. The non-industrial moments are disproportionately valuable.
The yard cat is not in our business plan. He's also one of the most reliable assets we have. Take that for what it's worth.