Our Customer Happiness team are the unsung heroes of The Book of Everyone. Our mission is to make the world a little bit more human, one personalised book at a time.

And the Customer Happiness team are the people who make sure that each and every day we get another book closer to completing our mission. But, as well as being heroic, they’re also a humble bunch.

So I’ve written this blog to make sure they get a little more of the credit they deserve. Here are just a few of my personal favourite stories about times our Customer Happiness team have gone above and beyond to help someone out.

Globetrotting books

Because we’ve helped people in 180 countries (and counting) send personalised books to their nearest and dearest, we’ve become experts in navigating postal services the world over. One of the things we’ve learned that all postal services have in common is that every so often, human errors occur and a book doesn’t make it to its destination as planned.

It’s frustrating but it happens, and 99.9% of the time we’re able to make sure a replacement book is hot on the heels of the missing gift.

On one memorable occasion though, to get to the right person in time for their birthday, the replacement book had to be sent jetsetting to the other side of the world entirely.

A customer got in touch us to say they’d ordered a book to be delivered to them in Switzerland. Somewhere between our printers in London and the snow capped peaks of the Swiss Alps the book had unfortunately gone astray. The Customer Happiness team got straight to figuring out where the missing book could have got to and sorting out a replacement.

However, it turned out that in the time between ordering their book and calling us up, the customer had moved. To a new address. In Australia.

No worries mate! A couple of emails later to explain the situation and our Melbourne printers had a freshly made replacement book in the post and on it’s way to our delighted – newly expat – customer.

Going the distance

Not only can our Customer Happiness heroes win races against time and span the globe with just a couple of messages, they can also go the distance when making sure a customer is happy requires a marathon, not a sprint.  

One sweltering Barcelona afternoon the office was abuzz with the sounds of hard work and music when a call was answered by Joe. These days you might recognise Joe as one of our writers (It’s usually Joe’s friendly face smiling out at you from the end of our emails), but he started his TBOE life as one of our very finest Customer Happiness team members.

After giving the universal arm-flapping signal for “I’m on the phone to a customer so please turn the music down and be respectfully quiet,” Joe started his conversation with the customer to find out how he could help.

Now usually, a call is wrapped up within a few minutes with the customer happy and the music going back on.

But a combination of a bad line, a customer’s unreliable internet connection, and some good old fashioned out of date software meant that Joe was in this call for the long haul.

After politely and patiently helping the customer not only finish their book but also update and reinstall several applications to bring their browser up to speed, Joe finished the call after over and hour to receive a standing ovation from the rest of the team.

Helping to make an extra special book

To me, this final example of our amazing Customer Happiness team going above and beyond sums up everything that The Book of Everyone’s mission is about.

We received a phone call from a lady who explained that she’d heard about our books and really wanted to make one for her husband. She explained though, that she would need some help from us because she was blind. JP took her through the entire book building process – describing each and every page and personalisation options – resulting in exactly the gift the lady had in mind.

It also gives us the perfect example of how, by making a little extra effort, we can make sure we achieve our mission of making the world a little bit more human, one book at a time.