Had a great time reading AdAge’s “Customer Service Is Either Great or Terrible – Is Anticipating Problems More Effective Than Responding to Them?” Here is an excerpt,
“I traveled extensively a couple weeks ago and suffered the usual indignities and disappointments of uneven customer service. You know the drill so I won’t bore you with details, except one: After a pleasant, issue-free stay at a hoity-toity London hotel, the guy behind the front desk wouldn’t extend my checkout time by an hour. He shrugged apologetically. I will never stay there again.
I’ve realized that I’m about as loyal as a fruit fly is long-lived.
It’s really unfair, if you think about it. The place did dozens of things just fine, if not exceeding my mostly unconscious expectations. But that one customer experience erased all of it and left me with the conclusion that the hotel isn’t worth visiting again. When I complained about it to a friend, he said that I might get a discount if I tweeted my dissatisfaction. This got me thinking about our approach to customer service, and I wanted to throw some questions at the CMO community that I’ve been asking myself:
Is customer experience a relationship or simply a series of events?
I wonder if there’s any collective loyalty beyond the last interaction. […]“So I left Jonathan a comment.
Hi Jonathan,
Really enjoyed your thought-provoking article. At the same time, I think it is flawed by its incomplete consideration of the social media impact.
In our new social media age,
– The single customer can split/multiply “socially”.
– The single great/terrible experience can amplify/multiply “socially”.
– New and some-what strange metrics of “dis-revenue per employee” and “dis-revenue per customer” need to be created to complement the traditional metrics of “revenue per employee” and “revenue per customer”.
When I can find some time, I will try to finish writing the following business case which I created as a placeholder in Feb 2010 when the Southwest news was hot.
“No LUV for Southwest Airlines: How to crash a brand in less than 100 hours in a perfect social media storm – A business case study (draft / beta)“
Cheers,
Kempton
Calgary, Canada
Filed under: advertising, Customer Services, Marketing 
