Learning to Knit a Sweater - a Customer Service Story

A lot of people decided at some point to imitate Jack Nicholson and make a 'Bucket List' after they saw the movie. Most of our lists are a bit more modest than Mr. Nicholson's since we are not all multi-millionaires. Mine includes this item: knit a sweater that can actually be worn. The rapid approach of another birthday with a '0' in it usually causes people to take their bucket lists more seriously and because I am no different, I decided to work on crossing off that item.

The internet is full of free knitting patterns that are called 'Free Knitting Patterns for Beginners'. I selected one and decided to see where I could find the material I needed. I looked in two places, but wasn't all that excited about the color selection  and almost gave up, but decided instead to continue on to the next one. As it turns out, it was a good thing I didn't find what I needed in the first two places.

After trying to understand the mysterious language written on some of the skeins of yarn and realizing that there was nothing that matched the instructions printed out from the internet, I decided to ask for help. The store attendant showed me some samples and started speaking a secret knitter's language I didn't understand. I didn't want to appear too naive, so I nodded my head in agreement. It seemed appropriate. Then she asked me a question. I gave in and said, 'Look, I am just a beginner. I've knitted about a thousand scarves and now I would like to try to knit a sweater.' 'Well, then,' she said, 'The best thing to do is talk to Mrs. Popp and have her calculate everything to make you your own pattern.' Hm. That sounded interesting.
 
I introduced myself to Mrs. Popp and she thrust two knitting needles in my hands, asked me what kind of yarn I liked. We chose something, she took my coat and asked me to take a seat at a table behind the counter. While I was waiting for her to tell me what to do (she had to wait on someone else, too!) I took a look around. I was surrounded by beautiful sweaters, vests and hand-knit socks. I had to smile. Here were a couple of women who had a passion that they had turned into their jobs. How perfect, I thought.

Before I knew it, Mrs. Popp had me knitting a small square with the needles she had given me and the yarn I had selected. She walked away for a five minutes and came back to see how I had progressed. 'Great!' she said. 'You are fast!' My ego swelled for a minute until I realized that fast didn't necessarily mean good.
 
What happened next continues to astound me. Mrs. Popp took the little square I had knitted, took out a measuring stick, some kind of calculation wheel, a calculator and a piece of paper with a rudimentary drawing of a sweater front, back and sleeve. She measured the square, wrote down some numbers, measured me, played with the little wheel, wrote down some more numbers and in just a few minutes I had a custom-made sweater pattern. Mrs. Popp told me to knit the first piece and then come back to see her and smiled. This service wasn't free, of course, but the cost was more or less symbolic.

I walked out of the yarn shop feeling like I really could knit a sweater. This is the kind of customer service that still exists in yarn shops. Or at least some of them. The ingredients are: people who have a passion for what they do, people who want to help others learn about what they do, people who want to enable others to do what they do, patience, knowledge about the topic and taking the right amount of time.

I took this yarn shop experience back to the office with me and asked myself if Axes Systems has these ingredients. Happily, I could honestly answer 'yes'. We may not be the first or second map-making system that pops up in the advertizing that people look at, but once they talk to us and choose us, our customers are happy. We are people who have a passion for what we do, we want to help our customers learn as much as they can and enable them to produce quality, we are patient and have deep knowledge about our customers' needs. We are always willing to take the time it needs to understand an issue or a need and we take the right amount of time to come up with a solution. We believe that our customers will agree.