In this edition of Web Enlightenment we'll be talking about Buddhist customer service and what you need to know about that.

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Would you like to Cancel ?

I recently encountered a fascinating bit of customer service - a call from a representative asking if I'd like to cancel my Constant Contact account.

Well - not my Constant Contact account exactly - but one where I am listed as the billing contact. That got me thinking about my Internet Entrepreneur readers and the important lesson to be learned here.

The Milarepa Tibetan Buddhist retreat center is located in northern Vermont. It is named after an 11th century Yogi who attained enlightenment in one lifetime. The center was founded in 1981 and it is on 273 acres of wooded mountainside.

As readers of this newsletter might recall this is the spot where I go off on retreats and such, I am very proud to be a member of this center.

Anyway - the center puts out an E-Newsletter and has for some time. There is an amazing guy in Florida named Mark who runs The Chenrezig Project - and he volunteers to put it all together for them.

At one point Mark was using his own Constant Contact account to send the news but the list kept growing and so I volunteered to donate an account for the center itself.

We setup the account and the person who maintains the website went ahead and changed the site signup box so that people subscribing would get added to the list for the new account that belonged to the Milarepa Center.

(hope everyone is still with me so far)

In the meantime Mark had added the center as an official "from" address in his own account, so the newsletter now looked like it was coming from the center. In fact it was still being sent from Mark's account, which nobody realized was happening.

As the months rolled by people who signed up on Milarepa's web site found they weren't getting the publication, and they started sending some emails about it. We kind of figured it must be a delivery problem or other simple issue - but the emails kept coming.

Then came the "would you like to cancel" call from Constant Contact.

See - they had observed that this account had 1,000+ subscribers but in fact no publications had ever been sent using it, but it was getting paid for every month.

Lots of excellent customer service calls later we figured out what was going on and all is now well with the world. Most excellent.

So take a minute and wrap your head around what Constant Contact did - they had a customer paying them $360 a year reliably, who looked to not be utilizing the service. So we weren't even using any of their impressive resources, which some would say is profitable indeed.

They spent time and money to contact that customer and ask if they wanted to stop paying for nothing.

It isn't hard to imagine the response of most businesses if some marketing person proposed a program like that - you might get laughed at.

But service on the web is quite different - and it involves using a different purpose, one that happens to in fact be quite Buddhist.

Constant Contact put the needs of their customer above their own - and there are lots of buzzwords like "customer-centric", "customer driven" and "customer focused" that folks use to evoke this idea - but Buddhism has a nice idea that also aligns rather perfectly.

"Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them."
-Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama

So as a result of this effort by Constant Contact the accounts were all corrected - they retained their paying customer, they got this story out in this E-Newsletter, and in fact they increased the likelihood of making more money. All those people getting the news that weren't before are now seeing the little Constant Contact logo ont he bottom of every message.

Here's the bottom line: When you consider really putting your customer first, really first, you'll encounter moments like this that seem risky and perhaps even stupid. Go ahead and proceed, we know that helping others as much as possible is a path to online greatness.

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