Ian M Rountree

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Customer Service and Consistency

August 18, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

How many times have you had problems with a thing you’ve purchased? Probably lots. The average person buys enough things in a month for the law of averages to kick in quite often and have something mysteriously break.

So what do we do? We get it fixed; everything has a warrantee. And while many companies’ warrantees behave differently, we can count on a certain level of consistency about the fact that, if we jump through all the hoops, they do in fact work.

How many times have you had an issue with the same store? Chances are you’ve had problems, but how often do you go back, in spite of problems in the past, and trust the same people with your money?

Yeah. Like you’re ever going to do that.

But why is there this disconnect? Well, for one things, policy never lies. It may be confusing, it may be tipped in favour of someone else, but it always behaves the same way. The problem with putting the same reliance on people is that they are people. People are, by nature, inconsistent. And no matter how deep our understanding of people and their foibles, there’s sometimes no predicting them.

Why is this an important thing to know? For one thing, it’s worth knowing that people deserve a second chance. Mostly good people sometimes have bad days. Mostly bad people may have knowledge worth digging for. It’s the same dealing with businesses as it is dealing with everyone else.

Dealing with eratic people sucks. I’m not condoning willfulness on anyone’s part. But it’s worth the effort of finding out a reason for inconsistency rather than writing people and businesses off for having a bad day.

How do you get past these kinds of situations? As both a customer, or someone behind the counter? What can we do, what tools and approaches can we use to lessen the impact of these situations where, failing all attempts at logic, people simply will not give us what we want, even when we know they can?

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Filed Under: Marketing Strategy Tagged With: commentary

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