Leaving Customers on a Negative
I have had two experiences in the last few months that brought home (again) the poor awareness and practice of good customer management is within small businesses.
1) Katherine and I went on a walking tour down into the Grand Canyon. We had loads of phone and e-mail dialogue with the company that ran it , and then had a great time on the trip…….., and then…….nothing!!!! Now why not at least sending an e-mail asking for feedback, or better still reminding us/ making it easy for us to recommend them to friends and family?
2) I had a course of lessons on the Alexander Technique via the Alexander Studio in London. All went well for about ten lessons, not cheap but I found it useful. Then I had to go away on business for a month or so; I e-mailed the studio owner to tell him i’d decided to dis-continue for now, asked that he cancel my next appointment and saying that I expected to start again when I was doing less travelling. The response…….nothing. Again I would have been more than happy to recommend the studio to others, had they not shown such a complete dis-interest when I had stopped paying the money.
No doubt in both of these situations there would be a ‘we were too busy’ excuse – but it just strikes me as being such a waste – stacks of marketing spend to win the customers in the first place, then not leveraging positive impressions that had been made. In both cases, a simple ‘exit e-mail’ would probably take less than 5 minutes to write, and cost nothing to send.
