Customer Service Lessons Learned from Lenny
Life with Lenny continues — and this week it comes with a full customer-service curriculum attached. Lori's dad is settled into his new place ten to fifteen minutes from her house (she's timed it, and she's visited every single day, because there's always something). The latest something: his senior-friendly flip phone stopped working, which launched Lori into a multi-day odyssey through a phone company's customer service department. She came out the other side with lessons every flower shop should hear.
Five hours, one buzzing headset, and a hang-up
The saga: the replacement phone would make exactly one call after activation, then die. Reset, repeat, for five hours on a Saturday — until the company's customer service hours simply ended for the day, leaving Lori's dad without a working phone. Along the way she talked to a rep whose headset buzzed loudly on every word; when Lori gently offered to help her fix it — because you can't talk to customers like that — the rep didn't care. Lori's running thought: a locally owned flower shop could never get away with this.
Sunday brought the low point. A rep opened the call with a monotone "may I have your username and ID," never acknowledged that Lori couldn't hear her, robotically re-ran a checklist Lori had already done 25 times, refused to reactivate the old phone with no explanation, claimed there were no managers ("I can make all the decisions"), said "have a nice day," and hung up. When Lori tried to log into the account afterward, it had been flagged. That's when the Lori who'd been patient for three weeks finally exploded — and, she admits, learned something about her own customers: when people are living through something emotional, their fuse is shorter than you know. Everybody has a tipping point, Vonda adds — sometimes low, sometimes high — and you can't see where it is when the customer walks in.
The rep who got it right
Lori called back and got a different person entirely: friendly voice, looked into the account, and — here's the key — explained. She walked Lori through exactly why the phone had been activated wrong and why the old one couldn't be reactivated. The outcome didn't change. The explanation changed everything. Lori had fired off three scathing emails in 48 hours; after that call, she sent a glowing one. As she put it: this is the recording that belongs in the training. It's the very thing the hosts teach shop owners — educate your customer. Vonda frames it as the "why": when something goes wrong, don't make an excuse; tell them where the breakdown happened. "I'm really sorry — if you don't mind, I'd like to tell you where I felt the breakdown was." Honesty softens even an angry customer, because there's not much to argue with when you come back with truth. Come back with "not my fault, ma'am, it's just how we do things," and the arsenal comes out.
One more sobering note: Lori knew within seconds of hearing the first rep's apathetic tone that the call was going nowhere. She had no choice but to push through — her dad needed a phone. But if that had been a flower shop? She'd have hung up and called another one. Your customers have choices, and tone of voice makes the decision for them in the first thirty seconds.
When Lori became the flower shop's customer
A second story drove the point home from the other side of the counter. At Christmas, Lori ordered Vonda a Harry & David gift basket — planned well in advance, timed to arrive before her Christmas Eve company. Then she watched the tracking as it sat in Grove City, Ohio, on the 20th, the 21st, the 22nd, the 23rd. The moment passed; the company left; the gift eventually arrived after Vonda got back from Iowa. Lori's realization: "this is how our flower shops must feel when their flowers don't get delivered" — genuinely conflicted, angry as the customer, sympathetic to the business, because the failure was in the carrier's hands. Credit where due: Harry & David's service team stayed calm, offered a replacement, a credit, free shipping — all of the things — and was transparent about where the breakdown happened.
And the consumer side matters more than shops sometimes remember: a delivery that slides from Friday to Monday may have a perfectly good reason, but the customer wanted that moment — the flowers arriving at the girlfriend's office in front of her coworkers, not dropped at her door that evening. The occasion is the product. Miss the moment and you've missed the point.
Every call is an emotional call
The thread tying it all together: buying flowers is always an emotional purchase. Happy, sad, mad — you never know which emotion is on the line, only that it's heightened. In a single day a shop fields a wedding, a funeral, a new baby, a birthday, an anniversary, and an "I'm mad at my husband" — one after another. That emotional whiplash is exactly why the skill of a floral salesperson matters so much, and why the hosts teach reading the customer in the first 30 seconds to a minute of conversation. And when something does go wrong, the play they teach in Sales Prep School is to diffuse: be honest, then ask "how can we make this right?" — offering a couple of concrete options first, and letting the customer choose or counter.
Key takeaways
- Every flower purchase is an emotional one — read the customer's emotional state in the first 30 seconds.
- Everyone has a tipping point you can't see; consistent warmth from the first hello is the only safe policy.
- Educate, don't excuse: explaining the "why" behind a problem can turn a scathing email into a glowing one — even when the outcome doesn't change.
- Your tone of voice decides the call; unlike a phone company, your customers can simply hang up and call another shop.
- When things go wrong, be transparent and offer specific ways to make it right — then let the customer choose.