Some time ago, I ordered a package somewhere overseas.
When it didn’t come after a month, I didn’t worry. With the crown locks and all that, the shipping was slow.
When one month turned into two, I sent them a quick email asking them to check it out.
The response I got was beautiful.
Paraphrasing, it was something like:
“This is weird – it was in a US port for a month and then it arrived in Hong Kong a month ago, which I don’t know if that’s normal when shipping to Australia because I’ve never tracked it before, but here It’s the follow-up details if you want to keep an eye on him. This is ridiculous. “
I love this for many reasons.
They were just as confused and irritated as I was. The worst they could have been was frivolous, but raging against the shipping company wouldn’t have helped either.
One person wrote this clearly, without copying it from a standard response list. Which, to be fair, I would have liked. All I wanted was some clarity and to make sure the package hadn’t ended up somewhere weird.
I realized that this was handwritten just for me, and no, not because it had a lot of specific details.
Also, this was in human language, not corporate. “Thank you for your inquiry. Your happiness is important to us. Err: PLATITUDE-3.txt not found.”
He showed me that a human who cares about business looked at my query.
It made me trust them more.
Which is funny if you think about it. A vast, soulless bureaucratic system, driven by rules, algorithms, and software, could solve my problem faster. Bureaucracy is efficient when it is well designed and reality plays well without doing anything unexpected.
Maybe that person sent that email, then went out for a smoke and forgot about it.
But my perception of the situation says that I should trust them.
It’s like in The Simpsons movie. Homer’s laziness destroyed Springfield and condemned them all to a slow and painful death.
His response to the angry crowd?
“The word ‘excuse me’ has been used a lot these days …”
People trust people.
And we trust people who sound like people, not like human spokespeople for faceless organizations.
If you want people to trust you, be yourself. Or if you’re sick of that advice, make it real.