There aren’t many companies that can boast about being in business for over 100 years. To reach that milestone, you have to be doing something right. For our client, Graniterock, they do a lot of things right including treating their vendors as well as they treat their employees and having a whole lot of happy customers. Their commitment to individual respect and customer service is evident at every turn so it was a little surprising when they approach us to do a customer service video. How do you improve when you’re already the best in the business? That’s exactly what they wanted to do: to show employees the little things they could do to turn a good customer experience into a great one.
Our job started in April and finished in November. We were part of a team that met several times to discuss examples of customer service excellence both inside and outside of Graniterock. I then went to work to fold all of this into a script that made sense. We wanted to show both positive and negative scenarios…the negative being customer service nightmares – at a fictional company called Acme Rock. The initial thought was to have Graniterock employees play all the roles but as we got closer to production in August, we realized that it wasn’t a good idea to have real Graniterock employees depicting bad service so we hired actors to fill those roles. The good customer service scenarios and all the customer roles were handled by Graniterock employees from throughout the company.
Often the thought of having non-professionals read lines and “act” could result in the producer having a major panic attack. But after rehearsals and some rewrites on the script, I felt a little more at ease that we might just pull this off.
Five days of production under the direction of Tam O’Connor Fraser, all over Monterey, Santa Cruz, and San Benito Counties including a day at Graniterock’s quarry in Aromas and days (and nights) of editing and we had our first cut. It was really well received but, of course, not perfect. When you’re dealing with one of the best companies in the business, your video needs to be practically perfect in every way. Tam was all in for a few more rounds of editing and review until we had a Graniterock-worthy DVD ready to roll out the door.