One of our partners in the publishing industry recently told me that with the way the economy has been (and continues to be) everyone has had to find places to cut. “It’s just a fact,” and he went on to say, “the trick is knowing how to cut smartly.” Some organizations have done just that – they’ve identified areas that their customers could do without. These are the things they could cut without hurting their relationships with their customers.
It seems during this recession many companies have chosen one of the single worst areas to cut: customer service. For example, my local grocery store, part of a large chain, rarely staffs their customer service desk around the lunch hour. It’s annoying if you want to buy stamps or have to return something. How many lost lottery ticket sales to you figure that represents a day?
Google “customer service” news and see how many articles come up about poor service, organizations that have committed to provide better service (once of course they have received bad marks) and how to demand better service. The topic gets a lot of attention – because people are irritated and we all deserve better.
Consider the conventional wisdom that it is as much as 10 times more costly to acquire a new customer than it is to keep one. By the way, I’ve done the math for some of my clients over the years and this is absolutely true. For some companies, a customer relationship may not actually be profitable until the second year of repeat sales.
In a poor economy new customers are simply harder to find. We all know this. So why would we do anything to risk the relationships we have? A customer is precious, hard to replace, and very expensive to replace. If you are considering making cuts to your customer service, it better be getting hard to afford the utility bills. Cutting customer service is only likely to make that problem worse.
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