Credit margin

The corporate top-performer cruise was not unfolding brilliantly, as the weather was cool and the seas were rough. Nonetheless, the evening event had been very successful and the next day’s business meeting had started on time, but it went side-ways during the coffee break. The servers simply couldn’t keep up with the (hung-over) participants’ need for the hot beverage. An executive member complained to management and then shared a lesson with us that I have remembered to this day. He said, It doesn’t matter how great yesterday’s event was, if today’s event is sub-par for whatever reason, yesterday’s success is obliterated by today’s relative disaster.

While a cruise line not serving coffee fast enough ranks hardly even as a first-world problem, the lesson taken from it can be applied universally, I think: One’s good-performance credit margin is a fickle measure of success on which only the foolhardy rely. 

To wit, our recent experience with a local vet clinic. 

A while back, our cat Holly was feeling poorly. It had come on quite suddenly and we were a bit alarmed. I called our regular vet to ask for an emergency appointment, but was told by the nonchalant-sounding receptionist that an appointment was not available for four days. I was distraught! We had been taking our cats to this clinic for many years — more than two decades, actually — and to get a response like that was appalling, I thought. When I pressed the young woman, all she could do, she said, was recommend an alternative clinic. I called them post haste and they said they could take Holly in immediately. With an exam and some antibiotics, they sorted her out and she was home by late afternoon. 

I was impressed with the new clinic for their swift and kind response and their quality of care — and for a stranger who dropped into their appointment book from the sky. This clinic is now our clinic. The former clinic is non grata in my books. The good care they had provided for years counts for nothing in the face of their response to what was, for us, an emergency with our beloved Holly. Their credit margin counted for nothing in the face of that experience. 

On the cruise ship, we had nowhere else we could go to get coffee, so we simply waited for fresh supplies to arrive. But in so many instances, we do have options. We can go elsewhere or see someone new. The lesson that stands on both sides of the situation? On the service side, never take your credit margin with your customer or client for granted; and on the customer side, be prepared to walk away. You might just discover a better quality of service from a new source. Credit is worth its value only when it is earned every day, every time. 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo of rough seas by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash  

Photo of Holly in the spirea by ALeR