Customer Service

If you’re ever in Maryland, I’d encourage you to find your way to St. Michaels. It’s a 400 year old plus community just a hop skip and a jump over the Chesapeake from Washington DC. St. Michaels is in what is called the “The Hamptons on the Chesapeake”. It has all the accruements you expect of small town Maryland; handsome churches, manicured colonial lawns, Victorian homes and a pleasant southern culture.

But that’s not why I think you should visit.

I think you need to get there to see Dirty Dan’s [No Drew, it’s not a place for your bachelor party]. You see Dirty Dan’s is a throwback to something we’ve lost in a lot of places in America. Something that we’ve been bred to not even miss anymore. Something that it seems only those of us with wisdom, age and experience really appreciate.

I’m talking about Service. Real honest to goodness, take care of the customer SERVICE.

Dirty Dan’s is a Service Station with actual service. No mini-mart. No blaring commercials above the pump. Not even a bad cup of coffee to be had much less a latte. The rotund Dan just pumps your gas, checks your oil and the pressure in your tires just like he’s done for the last 34 years.

Dan had a sign up for a day or two; “GAS – No Coffee No Kotex No Condoms” but the town made him take it down. It violated the sensibilities of the ritzy, high end Maryland community.

We’ve lost almost all of that service spirit in America. We now fix our own salads at salad bars [waiters use to bring salad carts tableside to fix your salad for you], bus our own tables at restaurants, check out our own groceries at the grocery store, print our own airplane tickets and on and on and on. The American public has over the last 40 years been offered poorer and poorer service and has become desensitized to it. We accept the lack of service as “the way it is” and in the name of efficiency.

WELL TODAY I DECLARE WAR. I am going to the mattresses¹ in the name of service!

Service has always been a top priority around here. One of the things I always enjoyed was helping people solve problems. It always felt good to help someone solve a thorny problem. One of the reasons that we have always answered the phone live is that it provides better service to you guys when you have problems, need to figure out how to move your data from X to Y or just want to say thanks. We get a lot of that, by the way.

I’d like to think that I’ve passed on that commitment to service to Kristin and Jessica who answer the phones, Drew who does inside sales and Scott, Emily, and Carlos who provide support. They do a great job but today I am taking it up another level. I just told our staff that I am creating the RTA Customer Care Group whose sole job is to provide great service. The folks in that area will be handling all the customer support issues and providing the highly tailored device converters that have solved some really unique problems for a lot of you.

THE MISSION OF THE RTA CUSTOMER CARE GROUP IS TO PROVIDE GREAT SERVICE.

So if you have an idea about how we can improve our service to you, something more you think we should do or just a comment I’d like to hear about it. But PLEASE, no emails that start off “Dear Dirty John”, it just doesn’t sound as good as Dirty Dan. Sounds kind of creepy actually.

As always you can’t reach me on Facebook, Instant whatever or Twitter. I’m available in all the standard ways; by email or leave a message under the Contact us button or, better yet, by phone on 262-436-9299.

I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you. And yes, we’ll answer the phone live when you call.

¹Going to the mattresses is a reference to the Mafia. When they declared war on another family they had to have a place for the soldiers to sleep at night so they would fill a large apartment with mattresses.