From Business Week's 2007 ranking of the 25 Companies Where Customers Come First: "Technology is leveling the barriers between alpha companies and also-rans, making great customer service one of the few ways companies can distinguish themselves. Retail, online and phone shopping channels are expanding, increasingly prompting customers to demand a seamless -- and painless -- experience."

The citation of technology is a pertinent one: nearly every customer comes to transaction with a well-developed sense of what ought and ought not stick, technologically-speaking.  A server outage that delays an order for the better part of an afternoon?  Not ideal, but certainly not out of the realm of possibility.  But a company whose intranet goes belly-up for days on end during the holiday season will likely find their next stack of holiday receipts quite a bit shorter, absent some dramatic change and damage control.

While house painting is a relatively low-tech endeavor, the challenge comes to our table just the same--how might we provide something seamless and painless to customers whose order history has been significantly leavened by technology; in short, how might we provide a service that mirrors, say, the caliber of an LL Bean experience or a call to USAA?  If technology's great gift is that it allows a company to call its customers by name (and remember their favorite colors) across every medium...well, we're in Boston and you may recall a little television show called Cheers...

Catchlight Painting...Where Everyone Knows Your Name.  We won't try to sell this as our new tagline for 2010, but the sentiment stands.