I’m not much of one to lead with a personal story, but sometimes they are the best life lessons we get.
Prior to working as a contractor for The Motley Fool I worked in the retail industry. Putting in my penance in retail for just shy of 10 years, I have a pretty good understanding of what good customer service is, and why it’s important to the survival and growth of a business. Although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “the customer is always right,” I’d certainly live by the adage that “a happy customer will tell one of their friends about an experience, while an unhappy customer will tell 10 friends.”
Source: martinak15, Flickr.
The actual statistics on that are a bit closer than the aforementioned adage, with the White House Office of Consumer Affairs noting that happy customers tell 4 to 6 of their friends about their experience, compared to unhappy customers, who will tell 9 to 15 people about their experience. Some 13% of people will tell more than 20 people.
Well, folks, I’m about to become one of those 13%.
To make a really long and somewhat complicated story as short as possible, travel booking site Orbitz Worldwide, Inc. (NYSE:OWW) and I had a “failure to communicate” that lasted two hours the other day. The basis for the disagreement rested on my repeated attempts to book a vacation package that popped up in the search query multiple times over a 15-hour period, but apparently no longer existed — yet was remaining fully listed on their website (by their own admission). I called the company out on their obvious software screening errors, and multiple pending credit charges to my account, and requested something be done for a longtime customer. In the end, neither side saw eye-to-eye… or in this case, click-to-click.
At the ripe age of 33, this is my first real instance of being so irritated with the customer-servicing aspects of a business that I’m choosing never to do business with them again. But this incident got me thinking that obviously I’m not the only one who’s ever had a customer service issue. It reminded me of just how important customer service aspects are to the image of a business and in gaining the cheapest and most efficient advertising available: word-of-mouth.
Be consistent
One factor consumers really appreciate in a business is consistency. A customer wants to be appreciated, and they love when businesses go the extra mile for them. But ultimately they want nothing more, in most cases, than for a company to simply meet their preconceived expectations. Businesses that don’t provide consistency run the risk of getting trampled.
There’s probably no better poster child for this than J.C. Penney Company, Inc. (NYSE:JCP). The core J.C. Penney Company, Inc. (NYSE:JCP) customer is extremely cost-conscious and perceives value based on the percentage of discount they receive. It had been this way for decades until now-former CEO Ron Johnson attempted to change the game by moving Penney’s from a retail discounter to an everyday-low-price vendor. The move flopped worse than any retail experiment I can ever recall, with the average comparable-sales decline over the past six quarters equaling 21.6%! If you don’t provide a consistent atmosphere for consumers, they will simply walk away.
