Behind The PBX — by Dan Lynn
By Dan Lynn
In 1990, I was just starting my sales career at AT&T. One morning I got a frantic call from my contact at McGettigan's Travel — a great, historic Philadelphia travel agency, still run by the McGettigan family. Their phones were down.
This was before the internet. For a travel agency back then, the phones were the business. No phones, no bookings. Every minute they were down, they were losing money and losing customers.
Now, I was a young sales guy. I wasn't a technical guy at all. The real fix was going to come from a team of technicians in a central office, miles away. So I put in a trouble ticket and made sure they understood this wasn't a routine problem. This customer's business was stopped.
Then I got in my car and drove over there.
I knew what a trouble ticket looks like from the customer's side. It looks like nothing is happening. You report the problem, and then you sit there with dead phones and no idea whether anyone is working on it. So I made sure they knew someone was. I stood in their phone room with them. I kept calling the AT&T technical team for updates and pushing on the urgency. I kept the McGettigan's Travel management team informed about what was being done and what would happen next. I was AT&T to them that morning, and I was their advocate to AT&T.
Within 30 minutes, the phones were back up. I didn't fix a thing. But the customer never doubted that we were on it, and they ended up being one of my best customers for years.
Here's what I learned. When a customer has a crisis, do whatever it takes. Care. Have a presence. Drive there if you can. Project manage it for them. Represent them. Be their advocate with your own company. Follow up with the people doing the work until they understand how critical it is. A moment like that can make or break the relationship. It's exactly when the customer experience matters most.
Questions this Key Learning answers
What do I do when a customer has an urgent crisis?
The author’s lesson is to care, be present, and take ownership of the response. He went to the customer, kept management informed, pressed the technical team for updates, and explained what would happen next. His presence made clear that someone was actively managing the crisis, even though he could not perform the repair himself.
How do I help when I cannot fix the technical problem?
The author helped by acting as the customer’s advocate and project-managing the response. He communicated the urgency to the technicians, followed up until they understood its importance, and gave the customer frequent updates. As our analysis notes, making invisible recovery work visible closes the gap between what the company is doing and what the customer believes.
Can handling a service failure well make a customer more loyal?
Yes, although our analysis notes that this is not automatic and repeated failures undermine the effect. A recoverable crisis can reveal a company’s character under pressure. In the author’s experience, the customer saw clear ownership and advocacy during the outage, never doubted that AT&T was responding, and remained one of his best customers for years.