Recently, we lost our resident tech guru to greener pastures in the Pacific North West. All of the office technical responsibilities ended up on my lap – needless to say, I was at a loss.

I had to pickup and manage hardware with names I couldn’t spell much less pronounce. It was scary. Fortunately, we are interviewing companies that will come in and do this for us. So this is only temporary.

In the meantime however, I had to get the file server working and the VPN configured. I spent a total of 15 hours on the phone. Normally, I would have found that to be completely irritating, but the engineers at Adaptec and Cisco were brilliantly patient, clear, and helpful.

Both companies have learned how to treat their customers: respectfully. I can’t tell you how important this is. No matter how little or much I knew, both companies had their own way of gauging my “geekittude” and talked to me at the right level in order to get the issues resolved.

I am not sure if these two companies are responding to "slack" they received about their customer experience. I do know two things for sure: (1) I will buy products from these guys again just because I know they have my back, (2) in an environment where competitive advantages can only be found in price point, and customer experience: good support rules.

The point: positive user or customer experience spells client retention and qualified opportunities for up/cross sells. Both Adaptec and Cisco now have me as a customer for life. It takes so little. Really.

If you are not convinced, consider the experience I am having with ADT. I signed a three year contract with ADT to monitor the security system at my house. Seven months ago, I cancelled my house’s landline because nobody was using it. At that point, ADT stopped working because they use that phone line to monitor the house. Sure, the contract says a working landline needs to be active at the house, so they kept billing. But who has a landline anymore? So, for the past seven months I have been paying for a service they have not been providing. I tried to talk to them about giving me credit for a couple of months. If they did, I wouldn’t pay the contract cancellation fee and take my business somewhere else.

Instead of working with me and realizing the value of a long term customer paying a recurring fee forever, they successfully pissed me off because of their rigidity and lack of empathy (and they were nasty too). Now, I am in the market for a new monitoring company – even though it will cost me more money to change than to stay.

This is how deep experience runs and how much it means to people. Let’s take Adaptec and Cisco's lead.