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Are You Destroying Loyalty

Business, like art, imitates life. Your success in business, like life, is primarily dependent on your relationships. And relationships are built on two things - trust and loyalty.

So you'd think that in these supposedly difficult times businesses would go out of their way to engender both? After all servicing the clients you've got is a far easier and cheaper way of keeping money rolling in than constantly burning your relationships with bad service.

Case yahoo in point??

A few months ago we were travelling a lot so I'd bought a USB modem to connect to the Three Network when we were on the road. I'd specifically asked the store if I could cancel the service and restart it at any time. The answer was "yes". So, when we stopped travelling for a while - Custom iPhone 5 Cases I cancelled the service.

Fast forward a few months.

We'd taken a week off over Easter and gone down to Adelaide. Thinking I would like to reuse the Three service I walked into a Custom iPhone 4 Case local store. And this where the fun began.

I couldn't reactivate the service - as the number had been given up and the SIM card was no longer valid. And to reactivate - I'd have to go through the whole rigmarole of credit check, signup etc., which took about an hour. Hey, I'm on holiday to have fun - not sit in a Three store filling in paperwork.

A prepaid was an option - but I'd need a new SIM card - so add $9.95.

Then if I didn't keep recharging, the SIM would expire and I'd be up for another $9.95 again.

Needless to say I wasn't amused. However not having an option I purchased the card and the recharge credit. The shop activated the account for me there and then.

Trotting back to Unique iPhone 4 Cases our apartment, I tried to connect - only to find that the thing wouldn't work.

So called Customer Support - who sorted it out. Well the service worked more Designer iPhone 4 Cases off than on for the next couple of hours then stopped with a big message telling me I'd run out of credit and needed to recharge by going online.

I'd bought 2GB - and used 50Mb - so what now!!!

Went to the Three site - needed an account to recharge - but couldn't create an account - the mobile number on the SIM wasn't recognised. Catch 22.

It's now 6pm and I'd just about had it with Three.

Another call to Customer Service - "Did you recharge the service Sir?"

"The shop activated it - so yes"

"No, you need the voucher to recharge and it takes 24 hours for our system to recognise you"

"What the *#?*# are you going on about? - I bought this, the shop activated it and I expect it to work."

"Well Sir, Let me explain our system - we give you 50Mb of free data and then you need to recharge. And it takes 24 hours for the data to get loaded onto our system so you can do so"

"Well that's great - I need the service now - Cool iPhone 4 Cases not in 24 hours"

"Well Sir there's nothing I can do - this is the system"

"I don't care about your system - I just care that I got what I paid for - something that lets me connect to the net and work and in this day and age it should be pretty much instantaneous - after all your shops are connected to your network"

"Well, Sir as I've tried to explain??"

And so the conversation went getting ever more heated. Catch 22 once again.

Right then and there if I could have taken that modem and thrown it out the window I would have.

When are organisations going to learn that they need to make it easy to do business with them. There is so much choice out there - and people are fighting for business. So go out and do the right thing and get my loyalty and trust. Don't make me fight you every step of the way with "Our process is the process and Sir, there's nothing I can do".

And the sad part of this is that over the last few weeks we've had a number of google other experiences similar to this - large organisations have just not even tried to win our business.

And here's a contrast??

Barbara walked into a local clothes alteration place here in Gordon to get a couple of stitches put in. The lady was obviously busy, but looked at the pants, thought there was a spare machine available and said - "Can you have a cup of coffee and come back - I'll have it done".

And when Barbara picked up the pants 15 minutes later - "No charge" with a smile!

Guess who bought loyalty that day. And there are at least four different tailors within a 5 minute walk. Barbara tells me she's about to give this woman her third NEW job since that incident.

So what's the lesson for all of us in business? Follow up and keep on top of what you say you're going to do. And above all make it easy for people to do business with you. After all they pay your bills and keeping them happy and coming back just makes good business sense.