Customer Service is Crucial to Repeat Business and Profitiability

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Being a Customer is a Real Workout

(from Still Speaking Daily Devotional by Pr. Lillian Daniel)

There's a new gym and rec center in my town and they are trying to recruit members. So my neighbor brought my daughter and me along with her to try it out. Presuming the first visit was free, we arrived in our gym clothes ready to try a class, stopping at the front desk to check in. And let me admit it, we were running a little late.

First, the lady at the counter discovered that my neighbor had brought her daughter's membership card instead of her own. That took a few minutes to work out. Then she realized that we were guests and brought out multiple forms for us to fill out. Okay, I can understand paper work. But then she charged us $10 each and we had no cash. By now the class had started.

After paying by credit card because we had no cash, we made the mistake of grumbling that by now the class was half over. "Oh, you didn't tell me you were trying out a class," she said. "That will be another $6!" After settling up this next transaction, there seemed to be less paperwork to getting married than to trying out this gym for an hour.

At that point my daughter did the math and realized that we were about to spend $32 for a day, when a three-month trial membership was $90. "Can we just sign up for that instead?" she asked. So I asked if we could just go to the class first and then join for three months. She looked at us like we were insane. No, we had to join as members first. After ripping up the old forms and filling out all those new forms, she concluded, "Everything's official and now you can go to the class just as long as you have copies of your birth certificates." Like we keep those with us in our wallets.

By then the class was over, our tempers were hot and I felt like an absolute idiot for wasting all that time. I don't ever want to see that gym again. But here's the good news. All the rules had been followed.

Are You The Predator?

(from Ray Edwards Email Updates 7-22-10)

Maybe you’ve seen the new movie, Predators.

The plot is simple: humans find themselves on a planet that is a game preserve, and the humans are the prey. They’re being hunted by aliens for sport.

This is how most of us feel about marketers. We feel like we are the prey, and the marketers are the hunters. Merciless, weird hunters who are not really interested in our pain, our fear, or our lives.

That’s why people are drawn to marketers who actually care about the people they sell to. It’s why company’s with high standards of excellence, customer service, and integrity enjoy long-lived success.

From the marketer’s viewpoint, it look like this: it’s the difference between being a predator – or being the shepherd who protects and cares for the flock.

Which one are you? And if you don’t like the answer, here’s a follow-up question: which one will you be today?

Beverage Charges at Old Country Buffet, Country Buffet, Ryan's

A letter to Country Buffet/Old Country Buffet HQ:

I see that you are now charging for beverages at Old Country Buffet. Interesting that only a couple of years ago you were loudly advertising the fact that you DIDN'T do so when all your competitors did.

It's really disappointing when a retailer (that includes restaurants) attempts to resuscitate corporate profits by sticking it to their customers, especially in tough economic times such as what we're ALL experiencing today.

Instead of helping your customers through the down times, you focus on your bottom line and think only of how to squeeze a bit more cash from customers' wallets.

In terms of marketing that tactic seems rather foolish -- if people are scaling back on dining out, why would they come to OCB if they will be paying MORE for their meal?

We're all in survival mode, but some businesses handle it better than others. Had you any sense or understanding of the marketplace, you would surely realize that offering diners even a temporary price rollback or something extra as thanks for patronizing your restaurants when they should be eating at home to save money, would bring you many more customers and immeasurable good will.

I and my family will no longer be dining at OCB, although we had enjoyed doing so for many years. Along with the ridiculous price increase we saw the last time we visited, your now additional charge for beverages just priced you right our of our budget and more importantly, out of our desire to patronize any merchant who shows such disregard for its customers.

While our "boycott" of OCB won't make a bit of difference to your bottom line, I am certain others will come to the same conclusion we have. I hope that in the end, though you may not lose any money from having fewer customers (you'll make it up in those beverage charges) your image will be tarnished enough so that when people do have greater disposable income for dining out, they'll remember the policies you and other retailers initiated to prop up drooping revenues and patronize those who instead partnered with consumers to weather the storms together.

ONE Is All You Get!

I recently placed an ad for a client in a special section of a local newspaper. The quarter-page ad cost $365. The issue previous we had run a half-page ad, for $725.

When I requested a few extra copies of the most recent special section from our ad rep, so that our staff could include them in their presentation portfolios, she told me they "had not received many copies of the newspaper" so she could only give me ONE copy.

ONE copy! We spent $365 on an ad that we can only get ONE print copy of.

I guess this is all part of the cost-cutting measures being emo,oyed by the newspaper industry, which too late figured out it missed the digital train and are now trying to catch up on foot.

Or more like crutches, with service like this.

Who Cares?

[from Seth Godin's blog]
At the post office the other day, a guy wearing a beautiful handmade scarf finishes his transaction and starts away from the counter.

A small nail holding the molding apparently isn't hammered in all the way. It catches the scarf, pulls the threads and ruins the scarf. The man turns to the counter, looks at the postal worker who took his money and says, "There's a loose nail here, it just ruined my scarf."

Tim, the postal worker, beaten down, tired, given up, stands behind the counter and barely makes eye contact. "Oh."


When you allow (yes, allow) all humanity to be stripped from your day, all day, then what?

Price Tags

While I don't expect thrift stores (secondhand stores, Salavation Army, Goodwill, etc.) to provide Nordstrom-like customer service, a little common sense certainly seems in order.

My biggest beef is employees' complete lack of thought when it comes to placing price tags on merchandise, especially because those tags are usually designed to prevcent price switching (understandable) and therefore require a nuclear weapon to remove.

By placement I mean putting one of these to-the-end-of-time permanent price tags on the most visible/delicate/easily marred/conspicuous part of the item; i.e., book covers, the front of a picture frame, the side of a ceramic vase, directly on the cover of a rare newspaper or magazine etc.

Even worse: stores that use grease pencil or permanent, bold black markers, the ink of which can only be removed from glass, reserved primarily for fine fabrics and non-glossy paper.

It almost seems as if they knowingly, even painstakingly, mar the merchandise with pricing to make us "pay" for getting such a good deal or punish us for having to shop at a thrift store instead of paying full retail.