Now, the Tiger incident is certainly an awful story, and the way in which Tiger has hit the headlines lately is no joke. But there is a lot to be learned by companies in this incident. As a company, customers are in a relationship with you, whether its a product or service. Often times customers are often treated as numbers, rather than customers. But, what if every customer loss was treated as headline news and not just a number? What kind of press would your company receive?
When the market was doing well, the power of consumerism was taken for granted. In the wake of the economy though, companies need to work harder as teams to keep customer satisfaction as a priority; whether it is a product that is distributed or a service that is offered, the only way to keep customers is to allow them to have a say. As soon as customers feel as though they are mistreated or not cared about, companies will lose customers.
I recently had an experience with a TV provider. Now, they had confused my dad’s account with mine (as we have the same names). This obviously was an issue. After hours of talking to them, and them insisting that one of us did something wrong, I had no interest in keeping them as a provider. Now, if they had been apologetic and had empathy for my issue, I would have valued my relationship with this provider much more than I do now.
Let’s say though, as this happened, if I had a camera crew and it became a headline. What would have changed in the exchange I had with my provider? I am sure, if I was their next headline, things would have been a lot different. As a result, companies need to take every issue that a customer brings up and treat it as if it was a headline news story. If they had done that, I might feel a lot better about my TV provider than I do now.
Companies need to treat each customer like a customer, and not another number. As soon as they show the empathy and seriousness to resolving the issues at hand, customers will have more loyalty to companies and products.
Purchase today!
I think this has to be a challenge with large companies. Those with hundreds of thousands of employees may not give each employee enough attention and you see that come through in their interactions with the customer.
As social media grows, I can’t help but wonder whether the pendulum will shift from hard stance don’t let them take advantage of us to cautious hassle-free dealing with the customer. (Probably not the TSA though!) More and more of us have hundreds or thousands of people that we can reach out to with a message. You can look at companies like McDonalds on Twitter and see them interacting with those who are having bad experiences.
The smaller companies could gain a bit on the larger ones because they realize that the extra caring, extra service that they get when they pay a bit more is probably worth it. As more people consume media online (maybe still several years down the road), the cable company that you dealt with may not be able to get away with that hassling anymore.
By: Adam on January 8, 2010
at 10:25 am