What is Your MPS Karma?

What is Your MPS Karma?

Do you often wonder why all your efforts in MPS have to be so hard and often don’t yield the results you expected? Maybe it’s Karma.

Karma is one of the cornerstones of Buddhism. In summary, the Buddhist doctrine states that the inequality of mankind has a cause and cannot be explained by random chance. In other words, each of us is deserving of our current struggles because of past transgressions in this or past lives.

While my own belief structure doesn’t necessarily hold to this doctrine, the point is not about getting into a religious debate.

But how often are we faced with past missteps and how hard is it to “reinvent” ourselves in our customers’ or employees’ eyes? Allow me to tell you a quick story:

A former client of mine (we’ll call him Jim) was in the market for a new car, but not any car — he was a Mercedes fan. He was a long time customer at the local Mercedes dealership, and they knew Jim by name. He was eyeing a new black Mercedes S-Class, and after taking it for a test drive, Jim signed on the dotted-line.

Well, Jim was pleased, the dealership was pleased and life was good. It was about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and Jim drove off the lot with his windows down — ready to hit the road. He got about 20 miles away, and the car began to sputter. Jim pulled into the closest parking lot, and the thing just died.

So Jim called the dealership. Of course they rushed right over, brought the car back to the service department and gave Jim a loaner. The next morning, the general manager gave Jim a call, and red-faced, told Jim they had pulled out a golf ball from the gas tank.

“I just can’t believe this, and this car must’ve been vandalized,” the general manager said.

Well, Jim went by to pick up his car, and things ran great for about two weeks. The car began to sputter again, and this time Jim was furious. It never died like the first time, but the service manager explained that Jim had hit something on the road, clipping one of the exposed parts in the engine. But where do you think Jim’s mind went? Jim never trusted Mercedes again.

Mercedes is famous for their quality and service. But in that one series of transactions, they lost a customer. In Jim’s mind, the car was a lemon.

How could this have been different? I don’t claim to know what that local dealership did or didn’t do as preventative measures, but now they have to deal with this soured transaction engrained in their institutional memory.

I bet you’ve experienced bad installations, missed service delivery expectations and probably dealt with more than a few dissatisfied customers (to say the least). Maybe you are having a hard time reinventing yourself — your customer still thinks of you as just a ____________ .

Handling change is one of the most difficult things we have to contend with in life, so why would you waste all of that energy in achieving the victory of a customer award and throw it all away in poor execution or sloppy service delivery?

Don’t underestimate the power of Karma in your MPS engagements. Remember, the power of something as small as a golf ball can turn your best laid plans to ruin.

Ken Stewart offers observations from the field of managed print services in his weekly column on MPS Insights every Wednesday. As a client advisor with the Photizo Group, he comes from and works directly with channel providers in the managed services space, developing educational tools and resources to promote lasting business transformation.

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Get the latest industry news, and follow ChangeForge on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

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