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Here’s your hat. What’s your hurry? (Part I)
July 13, 2007
(Cover Factor: The extent to which the area of a knitted fabric is covered by yarn. Also an indication of the relative tightness of the knitting.)
Cover Factor
For Friday, July 13, 2007
This is the first blog in this series. Thanks for stopping by. It’s supposed to be a dialog, so please chime in any time.
“Get out. Just get out, now.” How many times have you wanted to say that? We’ve been in home textiles showrooms too many times to observe the salesman’s dance to the tune of an unsmiling, very demanding, occasionally rude retail buying group. Most often, he’ll defer to the customer, no matter how painful. It’s no different at retail. It’s just an accepted cost (if only in ulcers) of doing business.
No more — at least at some companies.
“Get out.” Sprint just dumped 1,100 of its most irksome customers. Other firms are doing similar things—like hanging up on frustrated callers already in search of a problem solver when they called in the first place.
Welcome to the new age of CRM, emphasis on management. This is the ugly side of customer-centricity.
What’s more, that adversarial style might also be part of a conscious corporate strategy (and a little role reversal in the case of retail chargebacks, perhaps?) to extract more profit from customers confused over prices, contracts, and the small print. In “Companies and the Customers Who Hate Them,” Gail McGovern and Youngme Moon write in the Harvard Business Review that bewildered customers are often the most profitable because of the bad decisions they make. Some companies knowingly exploit that. But for most it’s an unintentional, but very seductive, slippery slope.
“Many companies in these industries and others find that their transparent customer-centric strategies for delivering value have evolved into opaque, company-centric strategies for extracting it,” the authors write. “Although this approach may work for a while — many notable practitioners are highly profitable — businesses that prey on customers are perpetually vulnerable to their pent-up hostility. At any time, customers may retaliate with vitriol, lawsuits and defection.”
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=R0706E&ml_action=get-article&print=true
And we would add Web rants, which undoubtedly cost millions in counter-advertising and marketing. Right or wrong, they will fight back.
The takeaway: At retail or wholesale, customers have always been difficult. Get over it. #
Posted by Brent Felgner on July 13, 2007 | Comments (0)
