It's late...it's early...after registering somewhere in its back basement that our cat's already started with the morning feed-me's, my mind shambles toward the upcoming workday's punchlist, and it's not pretty: some schedule rearranging on the heels of a project extension, a spate of customer calls, some lingering paperwork, and so on.

I kid: you could bounce a quarter off of my workflow twelve days out of ten, that's how tight my ship runs.  And if you believe that, well, denial ain't just a bridge in Brooklyn...we all have our heavy days at the office, in the field, on a jobsite, and more often than not the inclination to break days down into their component parts and handle one step at a time is a good one: thinking and acting in an ordered, linear fashion might not be tonic to the performance artist in your mental troupe, but it's usually a pretty good recipe for success.

Except when it's not. 

Except when it's not.  Those are hard words to hear, harder still to absorb, particularly as a customer service provider.  Certain trieds and trues almost always win the day: 'underpromise and overdeliver,' 'be proactive,' 'set expectations and then exceed them.'  These are good words, strong words, laudably direct and, in their own way, easily surpassable.  Who among us hasn't gotten off the phone after a great customer call and thought to themselves, "well, old boy, good on you--you just overdelivered the heck out of that call...why, you overoverdelivered!"

In certain situations however, too much is, at long last, too much.  Or, to put it another way, overdelivery can sometimes be overkill, and that's where proactivity becomes its own worst enemy.  Earlier today, I e-mailed a good customer 3 times in rapid succession with schedule updates, pasting each dispatch to the last.  Of course by the third update, the e-mail read like some weird, disjointed epistle from a country where the locals use a LOT of dashes, colons, and trade in contradictory start times.  In my haste to overdeliver (the self-police shout: quick response!  immediate response!  update customer immediately!), I'd muddied the waters considerably, and my customer quite rightly gave me a graceful tap on the wrist, suggesting we might resolve the issue via one man, one day, and at a minimum of complication.

House Painting Customer Service Lesson #5 (slot this one right after "Always smile when you're on the telephone"): sometimes less is more.  Or, Reactivity is NOT the new Proactivity!