Behind The PBX — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

When I was in Sales at AT&T, I got a frantic call one morning from my contact at McGettigan's Travel — a great, historic Philadelphia travel agency, that was still being run by the McGettigan family. Their phone service was down. This was before the internet, and for a travel agency back then, phone service was the lifeblood of the business. And on this day, the phones were down.

Now, I was just a sales guy. I wasn't even a technical sales guy. So I did the one thing that would actually fix the problem: I immediately put in a trouble ticket. But I also knew what a trouble ticket looks like from the customer's side — it looks like nothing is being done.

So I got in my car and drove over to McGettigan's. I went inside, got behind the PBX, and started making some banging noises on the back of it. It looked and sounded like I was fixing it.

Within 30 minutes, the phones were back up and running. The customer was so happy that I came down and fixed things. Obviously, the trouble ticket fixed the phones but showing up showed we cared.

They ended up being one of my best customers.