Cut service? Customers find ways to get even!
This decade began as the age of the customer.
“Customer Service Week” was promoted, celebrating the people who line the pockets of companies and actually pay our salaries, our rents and mortgages, and the necessities and luxuries of our lives.
It was a WIN + WIN vision. We create value for customers and they pay us value in return, in the form of profits.
But all sides have a killjoy, and here’s CRM, customer relationship management, and a new WIN-LOSE philosophy. Customers were no longer to be uniformly appreciated, revered, and respected unless they were in the 20% that supposedly provided 80% of one’s profits.
“The customer is always right” became “Guilty until proven innocent.”
A feed-the-winners, starve-the-losers mentality crept into company help desks that were once repositories of empathy, helping struggling shoppers.
Today, if you’re labeled as a customer who needs to be held too much, you’re thrown off the train, like SPRINT just did with 1,000 customers who called in too often.
That carrier just dropped them, and effectively said: find another supplier, go away, you have no value to us.
But you know what? Customers are annoying. You can throw them away, but they won’t go away smoothly. Even if they do, they will remember your misdeeds and take revenge.
When a member of my family, a highly intelligent computer industry professional, saw me discussing SPRINT’s conduct on CNBC a few weeks ago, he lit up and said with a mischievous smile:
“Guess what? SPRINT just taught millions of customers how to terminate their contracts. Just speed dial their tech support or service department 20 or 25 times and they’ll gladly let you go without an early termination fee!”
Loyalty is a two-way street. Try to be disloyal to customers and they will find a way to reciprocate.
Or, take what was a perfectly useful WIN+WIN model, try substituting it for WIN-LOSE, and your customers will make you LOSE-LOSE, before you can reluctantly mutter, “Geez, we’re sorry!”
