Awesome Customer Service at Jury Duty?!

Sometimes you find great service in the most unexpected of places.

This week I had to report for jury duty. I had done this once before, so I knew to be prepared for a long, boring day…

I arrived at the courthouse first thing in the morning, checked in, and awaited my selection. I don’t know if it was good luck or bad, but my name was called to be part of the first case’s jury pool. This was at 8:30AM.

We were taken up to a room where we watched an instructional video on how to fill out the “juror questionnaire” sheet. Weirdly, they showed us this video after we had filled out the questionnaire, but better late than never I suppose.

My understanding (based not on my own amazing powers of deduction, but rather on what the court officer told us) was that after the video we would be taken to the courtroom for voir dire, which is a fancy term for, “the pre-trial bit where lawyers ask you questions so they can reject you.” Kind of like a first date, only with the rejection being overt instead of being subtly communicated through body language, unreturned phone calls, and restraining orders. But I digress…

In this case, we were not taken to the courtroom after the video for voir dire. No, we were told to sit tight and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Three hours later it was time to break for lunch. We had an hour and a half after which we were supposed to report back to the same waiting room.

Two beers, one burger, a plate of fries, and one nice conversation with a fellow juror later I was back in the waiting room.

After a few minutes, a court officer came in carrying a pitcher of water and some cups. Someone jokingly said, “is that for us?” The officer replied, “yes,” and then proceeded to give anyone who requested it a cup of water.

As people were thanking him he said, “the number one and two complaints jurors have is 1) ‘They left us in here without telling us anything’ and 2) ‘They left us in here without any water or bathroom breaks'”

He then made sure we knew where the bathrooms were. And, while he couldn’t give us any details on our specific case, he did try to explain to everyone how the process works and how we were waiting because the lawyers downstairs were, “taking care of their business.” (I know that “taking care of business” is often a euphemism for going to the bathroom, but I am going to go out on a limb and assume that’s not what he meant.)

We were all appreciative of his thoughtfulness and communication. (Though of course, no good deed goes unpunished, and once he opened the door to it people started asking him inane questions that a) there was no way he would no the answer to, b) if he did know the answer he couldn’t tell us anyway, and c) would not have changed our situation one iota even if we did know the answer. I think there has to be a blog post on that in the near future. but I digress…)

Once he left, I got to thinking about what he said were the two biggest complaints jurors have, and how they could apply to any business:

They left us in here without telling us anything

People hate to be left in the dark. This is why jurors started asking inane questions, because even though they couldn’t do anything about it, they wanted to know. In the same way, your customers want to know.

It is easy to fall into the trap of, “if I have nothing new to report I won’t report anything at all.” This is a huge mistake. Keep your customers in the loop. If you’re waiting for a part to come in, or for another vendor to complete their work, or for the weather to be just right, or whatever, don’t assume that the customer a) already knows or b) only wants to hear about progress. Believe me: a customer who is waiting on something from you is thinking about you a lot. A LOT.

A little communication update, even if just to say, “sorry, I am still waiting on x, y, or z” will go a long way to maintaining great customer relations.

They left us in here without any water or bathroom breaks

If for whatever reason you can not deliver exactly what your customer or prospect wants at this time, can you at least attend to their basic needs? Ok, so your schedule is too tight to meet in person for a two hour in-depth discussion, but you can spend 15 minutes on the phone to address the most important issues. A client wants to move a deadline to a time that you just can’t meet? Don’t arbitrarily say, “yes” and miss the deadline or say, “no” and lose the business. Figure out what you can do in that time frame and what the client absolutely needs to be done by then, and see if there is a happy middle ground.

It’s easy to fall into the mindset of “all or nothing.” Use a little creativity and flexibility to find ways of keeping customers happy now by giving them what they need in the short term, and you’ll find your customer rapport greatly improved in the long term.

Amazingly, I observed these lessons from a city employee who, it turns out, was talking to us on his lunch break! Well done! Think about that the next time you bad mouth the service from city government…