This past July I talked about how Dave Carroll’s “United Breaks Guitars” YouTube post had brought new strength and power to consumer complaints against corporations’ customer dis-service. The original song/video has had over 5 million views, and is now available on iTunes. This is an astounding amount of bad publicity, damaging mainstream media press coverage, and negative word-of-mouth marketing for United Airlines.

Yesterday, August 19, Huffington Post reported that troubadour Carroll has, as promised, released his second of three songs/videos about his year-long saga of trying to get United Airlines to pay for the repairs to his Taylor guitar, broken by UAL baggage handlers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

The lesson to learn here is that while the benefits of good customer service might take a while to become apparent, bad customer service gets noticed – talked about, and publicized – immediately, and widely, and repeatedly. Businesses spend trillions of dollars every year in all kinds of marketing programs and tactics to gain customers. And everyone claims that they understand the principle that it is easier and less expensive to keep a good customer than to constantly find new ones.

That said, then why do businesses persist in giving crappy customer care? Today’s media-savvy consumers cannot be brushed off as minor annoyances. They have global reach. As Carroll has shown, any positive results that a company might have been gained from all that marketing spend can be quickly negated in one stroke. Have you seen the United Breaks Guitars t-shirts people are wearing to the airports?

UAL will be spending marketing money on damage control for months to come. You and your business can avoid a similar image catastrophe by making positive, responsive, customer service an integral part of your marketing plan and business operations plan.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: customer care, customer service, Dave Carroll, Marketing
Posted on August 21st, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Here are another two stories about the importance of good customer service.

I’m heading back to Illinois to move the last of my mother’s furniture from her newly sold house to her new place in Ohio.

We were searching online for moving van/truck rentals and price estimates. One place we looked was Penske.com. The next day we received an email from Penske, following up on our inquiry and asking why we hadn’t booked with them. The email gave us a toll-free phone number and a promise of a discount.

I called them back and the customer care rep helped me make the reservation. Gave me the discount from the email, and a Web discount, checked on the return location, confirmed times and the whole lot. In all we saved over $175 over the competitor’s best rate.

Now, compare this with the tale of my Physical Therapist. She went to the local Eugene Honda dealer to buy a new hybrid sedan. She was a loyal Honda customer coming back for another car. The salesman she was dealing with showed her the car. The color was not even close to the one she’d ordered. After badgering her a bit he walked off to do some other business.

While she waited, thinking he was going to return, another salesman harangued her with “You’re only buying the hybrid for the gas mileage. What does it matter what color it is?”

Hey, even the car company founded by Henry Ford (of “you can have any color you want as long as it is black” fame) realized early on that customers wanted cars with colored paint, and they wanted the color they liked.

Well, my Physical Therapist was so angry at her treatment that she chose to drive an hour to Salem to a different Honda dealership to buy a car in a color she liked.

Here we see again the difference that customer service can make to your business. In one case we have a good program that followed up a contact, and with a friendly and knowledgeable phone representative, clinched a sale for the company.

In the second case the badgering, condescending, and dismissive sales staff lost what started out as a sure deal of $25,000+. Now, maybe $25K is a throwaway deal to these guys, but many businesses can’t afford to cavalierly lose returning customers.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software, Inc.

Tags: customer care, customer service, lost sales, sales
Posted on May 7th, 2008 | 1 Comment »