Listen up: this charity needs your help

DEAR READERS: Ordinarily this column is entirely answers to your questions, but there’s always an exception to the rule, and today is one of those exceptions. I think there’s a real point to be made, and then I want to bring your attention to what I think is a very unusual and worthwhile charitable endeavor.

I have worn hearing aids for years. I bought a very expensive pair, and they were perfectly good except for one function that made them unacceptable to me but perfectly OK to 98 percent of other customers.

After discussing it with my audiologist, I called the company that manufactured the hearing aids. I asked for the president’s office, because I believe in going right to the top. Can you believe that the president of this huge company, Starkey Hearing Technologies, answered his phone himself? I was impressed!

I was prepared for an argument after I told him what my problem was, but he said, “That could happen, and we’re going to make it right.” That took all the fight right out of me. He said that if I would come to the Starkey factory at the company’s expense, I would be turned over to the best people in the business, and when I left, I would have a pair that worked for me.

There is a lesson here for all of us. When you’re talking to someone such as a customer, the first thing you should say is, “You’re right; we were wrong.” How can you argue with somebody who replies in that manner? The answer is, you cannot.

Somebody once said, “You never win an argument with a customer.” You may technically win the argument, but the bigger picture is that you lose a customer. Jerry Ruzicka, the president of Starkey, knows this.

Starkey gave me the royal treatment, and so far the replacement units have resolved the difficulty I was having.

Now this story takes a bit of a turn. The owner of the company, William Austin, is in his late 60s and a multimillionaire. To get at that position in life one would think that he’s at his company all the time, but he is not. Why? Because he considers himself a medical missionary (no religion involved). He travels all over the world at his expense giving hearing aids to people who never in their lifetime could afford them. He has provided hundreds of thousands of hearing aids to people in Haiti, Africa and elsewhere in the Third World.