LeQ Medical just got an A rating from the Houston area Better Business Bureau. LeQ Medical started in 2003 and we joined the BBB a few years later. Now we aren't really all that active in the BBB. I don't go to their meetings. They send me a newsletter, which I mostly don't read. But I do appreciate what they stand for, and we do renew our membership annually.

What does this mean to you? If you're a client, it means you're dealing with a company that is at the very highest levels in terms of customer satisfaction. Put another way, fewer people complain about LeQ Medical than other companies.

Let me inflict a few more statistics on you. Several years ago, we did a retrospective analysis of our sales data and found that  60% of the companies who did business with us came back and did 5 or more projects with us within one calendar year. We haven't updated those statistics in a couple of years, but the same pattern seems to hold. Most of the customers who use our services come back and keep using them.

So how does this happen? It really isn't just good luck and it cannot be attribute to the winning personalities of the people who work here. We have a few systems, and they are probably workable (with some adjustments) to other businesses. I never really formulated it until today but this is how I would describe it.

1. We try to do everything right, even if it takes a little extra time or some extra duct tape or whatever.
2. Being human, we are not always able to abide by Rule #1. So if we make a mistake or even if we have a near-miss, we discuss it as an office. Now we're a small office, so we have the luxury of actually sitting down and talking about what just happened. We don't do this two weeks down the road; we do it as close to the event as possible.
3. If possible, we try to figure out some kind of safeguard to put in place to prevent a future mishap. We operate on the assumption that if it happened once, it can happen again. We need to figure out how to build in more layers of security or better guarantees. ("Trying harder" is not something we would accept as a solution. Having another person check the work would be.)
4. We then discuss if the problem is a symptom of something larger that might be wrong or if it was just a one-time event. If it is a symptom of something larger, we think of it as a "lesson learned" event. That means we re-visit what the big picture is and see if we can fix that.
5. Then we immediately put our new system in place and cheer ourselves on. We don't beat up the person who made the mistake.

Let me give you an example of a problem that is indicative of something larger that is wrong. We once had a document sent to a client and the client found a couple of typos in it and got mad. Now I think people generally over-react to typos, but this client was right. There should not have been anything wrong in the document and there was. This was not really an isolated event although it was the first complaint. The problem was that I was writing copy and doing my own proofreading; that's not a good combination. It's devilishly tricky to proof your own work, and I was not good at it. Solution: after that, we used outside proofreaders.

The one "event" or client complaint could have been managed but it was really a symptom of something that was going to keep happening until we got a system in place to manage it.

Some problems are totally isolated events. We learned how to manage during hurricanes by having Hurricane Ike hit us and knock out power in this area for days. We will be much better equipped in the future (although we were only "offline" for about 24 hours) but that was an isolated event and one that hopefully will not continue to plague us year-in and year-out.

Our general philosophy for our customers and ourselves is this: anyone can make a mistake. Never penalize or berate a person who makes an honest mistake. But businesses who make mistakes need to get serious, jump on the opportunity, and figure things out.

Here are some systems we've instituted here just because of a mistake:

• We ship out dissection supplies; after some mishaps we set up an easy-to-read order form and a check system to minimize potential mistakes
• We sometimes missed emails ordering things–we now confirm receipt of orders within 1 business day as a way of minimizing accidentally missing something
• We set up and trained an outside proofreader to work with us
• We had some problems with our website and we learned how to bring most of that work in-house

Anyway, you should know we take your business seriously. And if these tips and tricks help you manage your own work, there are yours with our compliments.

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