Dissatisfied Customers – What’s Really at Stake?

As a customer receiving poor service, you’ve no doubt wondered what the people in that organization were thinking. You inform an employee about a problem, and rather than apologize, they make excuses or act like they’re doing you a favour fixing their mistake. One reason why this is so common is employees focus on the value of the transaction rather than the value of the relationship. In other words, what’s at stake is not the $50 transaction – it’s the customer’s thousands of dollars’ worth of that lifetime business. Not to mention the word-of-mouth publicity.  The lesson – for greater long term profits, managers should waste less on expensive ads and price discounts trying to buy new business, and instead invest more on training employees on how to delight and retain customers they already have.