Customer service

Today, I was made to feel very low about myself and had me doubting my marketing skills as well as my customer service skills.

Never in my life, I would actually think someone could make me feel so badly, it was like a bad interrogation with a young entrepreneur.

All I can say is, there is a fine line between being a dynamic entrepreneur and an arrogant one. Doesn't mean that you've won a TV show and become the ambassador for youth entrepreneurship or that your business got acquired by a big conglomerate means you can be so arrogant about the way you dig information and hammer a person about marketing priorities.

What made me feel extremely bad is the way it ended up looking like as though I didn't care much about customer service and that it was not an important enough priority to me.

Somehow, it felt too late to even justify my point of view and the sheer cockiness of Mr-I-am-right-all-the-time's face seemed not worth it.

Customer service and satisfaction is the most important thing to me. The night deliveries, packing shoes in the middle of the night to meet someone's last minute deadline, relentless tracking of shipment status on behalf of customers, many calls to Australia post to settle a problem out of my control and writing personalised notes to each of my direct customers - just shows how much I care about people who buy shoes from GlamRockChic.

If at all, I am the greatest believer of the Zappos delivery happiness culture and a big champion on improving customer experience, no matter what, not because it's a marketing thing to do, but because I really am appreciative of anyone who would even part their money to buy my creations.

To have customers coming up to me when I was working in a boutique and say thank you for the incredible turnaround on customer service in your team was the most gratifying thing I could ever hear.

How could I have let a stranger who has high IQ but little EQ finesse in interviewing pull me down so much that I begin to feel so bad? How could someone who exudes so little warmth contest me on the importance of customer service?

Not all entrepreneurs are as nice as they are made out to be in the press.

My advice to rising entrepreneurs is, be humble, be open minded, be gracious and above all, be kind to whoever you meet.