Saturday, November 11, 2006

Customer Expectations vs Business Policy

It never stops to amaze me how businesses especially small ones develop business policies without relating their outcomes to direct customer service results. For instance, I walked into a hardware store the other day and wanted to make $145.00 purchase. No big deal right? Well it certainly ended up as one. They don't take credit cards, they only cash or debit cards.

Never the less I pursued this with the store manager. First, I didn't bring enough cash. Second, it is a business deductible charge so I wanted it on my Visa card. Well the company policy was set up so that the hardware store would not have to loose that extra small percentage of a purchase that credit card companies charge for the privilege of them bringing more business into the store. This was a "Big mistake", especially since their competition takes Visa and other cards. The manager offered no recourse, not even a feed back channel to higher decision makers, which was another big mistake in the creation of a good customer experience.


Such non customer centered decisions force customers to comply with a company policy that is not customer friendly creating bad feelings in the customer. Such Business centered policies pushes business to a competing business thus loosing a potential revenue stream. "True Customer Service" meets the needs of the customer including formatting business policies to enhance that customer service experience. Needles to say, I went to the competitors and bought with my Visa. Hey! guys, earning 100% of nothing is still 0%. 90% or 60% of something is still money in the bank and a happy customer.

As always we invite your comments and ideas.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes it very true some of the shop keeper do not keep card’s swapping machine and lost many customer and end of the day around $1000 or more than that, I went to buy house hold item and surprise to see shop keeper was keeping card swapping machine and it was very small shop and I can not never expect card swapping machine with him and he earned the trust of mine but now he is the owner of very big shop and he has some are fixed customers like me really customer service plays very important role in any business.