Some time ago, I ordered a package from somewhere abroad.
When it didn’t happen after a month, I didn’t worry. With corona lockdowns and such, shipping was slow.
When one month turned into two, I sent them a quick email asking them to check it out.
The response I got was beautiful.
Paraphrasing, it was something like:
“This is weird – it stopped at a US port for a month and then it arrived in Hong Kong a month ago, which I don’t know if it’s normal when shipping to Australia because I’ve never tracked that before, but here they are. tracking details if you want to keep an eye on him. This is ridiculous.”
I love this for many reasons.
They were just as confused and irritated as I was. The worst they could have been was weird, but raging against the shipping company wouldn’t have helped either.
One person clearly wrote this, without copying it from a list of standard answers. Which, to be fair, would have been fine. All I wanted was some clarity and to make sure the package hadn’t ended up in a weird place.
I realized this was handwritten just for me, and no, not because I had a lot of specific details.
Also, this was in the language of humans, not corporate. “Thank you for your inquiry. Your happiness is important to us. Err: PLATITUDE-3.txt not found.”
It showed me that a human who cares about the business analyzed my query.
It made me trust them more.
Which is funny if you think about it. A vast, soulless bureaucratic system, driven by rules, algorithms, and software, could solve my problem faster. Bureaucracy is efficient when it is well designed and reality plays well without doing anything unexpected.
Maybe that person sent that email, then went out for a smoke and forgot about it.
But my perception of the situation says that I should trust them.
It’s like in the Simpsons movie. Homer’s laziness destroyed Springfield and condemned them all to a slow and painful death.
His response to the angry mob?
“The word ‘sorry’ has been thrown around a lot these days…”
People trust people.
And we trust people who sound like people, not human spokespersons for faceless organizations.
If you want people to trust you, be yourself. Or if you’re sick of that advice, keep it real.