Businesses rely on ensuring that their customers and clients keep coming back. As a mystery shopping company, our entire business is set up around this fact. We keep our clients coming back by helping them keep their customers. Because we spend a lot of time thinking about this, we can sometimes be quite startled when others don’t appear to agree. A recent experience particularly got us thinking about how a business gets (and keeps) new customers. There are a myriad of techniques employed to get new customers into your business, but once there, they’ll only stay if you provide a service that is good enough.
Our experience went like this: we decided to get pizza. Because one member of the group did not want to get pizza from the usual company, we tried a different pizza company. A simple quirk of fate has got us through their door, a good opportunity for them to win some new repeat customers (or not). When we arrive to collect our pizza, our name was already listed as being ready, which pleased us. Unfortunately, we then experienced a series of customer service 'do-nots' that had us wondering whether they had any customer service training at all. The short list being:
- They did not acknowledge us. This may not appear to be much of an issue, but certainly exacerbated the problems which were to follow.
- They left us waiting for 10 minutes while they took phone orders. This, again, wouldn’t matter so much if we had received the acknowledgement, but instead just made what was to follow worse.
- They did not have the pizzas ready. This was pretty bad, but mistakes like this happen and how you handle them can occasionally win you life-long customers. This did not happen though.
- They misled us. Two of our pizzas were ready, while one had either been forgotten or accidentally given to another customer. Instead we were told that it was “nearly ready”, whilst we watched the preparation from start to finish.
- They did not acknowledge or apologise for our extended wait.
