Whether you work for a mom-and-pop store or a global brand, you do have haters—and you can’t afford to ignore them. By embracing complaints, you put haters to work for you, and turn bad news good.
So few companies hug their haters today that those that make this commitment are almost automatically noteworthy and differentiated from their competitors.
Customer service and customer experience matter. And they’re going to matter even more in the future. The world is inextricably linked now by transportation and technology that was unthinkable 20 years ago. This global interconnectivity mutes the advantages of price and location that businesses formerly used to create market inefficiencies and gain a disproportionate share of customers.
Why I always order from the same pizza place
Take Bloomington, Indiana, for example. There are more than a dozen banks in this modest-sized college town where I live. All of them offer almost precisely the same core services, at fees that are not appreciably different from one another. From the perspectives of product and price, they are nearly indistinguishable.
There are even more pizza places nearby, and they all offer roughly the same thing at the same cost, partially because they are buying ingredients at the same price from the same global suppliers, and are tapping into the same labor pool, where what you pay a college student to make pizzas is essentially the same for each restaurant. Likewise, my accountant and your accountant and my barber and your barber are doing almost the exact same things for approximately the same fees.
In today’s world, meaningful differences between businesses are rarely rooted in price or product, but instead in customer experience. How does each provider make you feel when you interact with them?
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