Small Office, Home Office Information |
| How Many Customers Can You Afford to Lose? We have a confession to make. We work with computers every day and although we have absolutely no background in anything to do with computers we are now at the stage where we can build our own machines … and yet we look and act like ordinary people. We try not to look and talk like geeks and I think that we carry the part really well because people in computer stores and other computer geeks will often talk to us in language reserved for first time users. We even have a daughter who is a systems administrator for a multi-national company and sadly, I have to confess, that we are even more geeky than she is. So yesterday we went shopping for some new hardware. We have had a need for a PDA for quite some time but have been putting it off because the retail price has been so high that it was hard to justify the expenditure in terms of value for money for our business. But lately the prices have been falling and yesterday we decided that the time and the price was right so off we toddled to a relatively new electronics store in town. They were running a special on PDA’s so that made the price even more attractive. Now here in Australia yesterday was the day before Father’s Day so the shops were quite busy. The electronic store that we went to had around seven or eight staff working and there were probably 15 customers in the store when we arrived. We wandered around the store and finally found what we wanted to look at and then we waited … and waited. Staff members walked past us and ignored us. I tried to catch someone’s eye … and the staff inspected the floor. Sure, they were dealing with customers at the time but even some acknowledgement that we were not invisible would have kept us happy and waiting. Instead we gave up and walked out. We drove another block, walked into the biggest computer store in town and were immediately greeted by a polite staff member. We asked to look at some PDA’s and were shown the range that they had in stock. The sales person was able to answer all our questions. She was more than happy to go to the trouble of taking one out of the display case and firing it up and then displaying its functions to us. We rarely buy anything like that without going home and discussing it first and so there was no sale made right then and there. But there was no sign of disappointment, the service remained courteous and the sales person was happy to record the details for us and give us a phone number that we could call in case we wanted one put aside until Monday. When we got home we discussed it, made sure that it really would fit in with our requirements and then called her to let her know that we’ll be in today to pick it up. We were even happy to pay over $50.00 more than we would have at the first shop simply because we were not ignored. How many
customers are you losing simply because you’re too busy to acknowledge
their existence?
4 Sep 2005 |
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