CHAPTER 4
Do You Tell Your Customers Not to Call You?
Obviously no business is going to fess up to telling Customers not to call, but it happens! Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear a company just come out and say, “Your call is not important to us”? I know that this is not realistic, but, on some level, I would applaud the honesty of it. Often I call places and this is the message that I get even if it is not the words that they are using. Companies send a lot of messages unintentionally. You would expect service to be a fundamental aspect to how we do business, but it really is not. For many companies, the Holy Grail is figuring out how to get Customers to pay for items without servicing the Customers’ needs. It is probably not a good long-term strategy but unfortunately many aspects of business are built on short-term expectations. The average tenure of a CEO is less than seven years, so, depending on the nature of their business, the CEO might not have it in their interest to have you repeat purchases.
Remember that we are all human, which opens the door to many amazing feats but also many common pitfalls, including caring what people think about us at any given moment. But, ultimately, Customer Service does not fall strictly on the CEO because, truthfully, they are probably not even fully aware of the problem.
When companies were smaller, CEOs were close to the Customer or the employee on the front lines. But today we are in a world of large, multidimensional global businesses. ...
