The Customer Promise

How does really lousy customer experience make you feel?

As well as intense disappointment I do admit to also experiencing a slight excitement about it as well. I mean, really, I just want things to go well – as I expect you do.  I really don’t want or expect to be “superpleased” – I just want reasonable service and to get what I paid for. I want it to go smoothly and right first time.

But this is an area in which my professional interests dovetail with my personal life: I’ve always been concerned with how my work can help my clients better serve their customers.

So when something goes wrong, I’m afraid I just can’t resist dealing with it as if it were a “moment of truth” in a client engagement. The “moment of truth” is the proof point for what we call “the customer promise”, which, roughly speaking, includes all the claims and promises – implied or explicit – made in the marketing or branding spiel.

My most recent case concerns the garage from which I bought my current car and which has serviced virtually all the cars I’ve had over more than ten years. Believe me those years have been full of highs and (mainly) lows in customer service. Come to think of it this retailer must be one the top handful of suppliers in terms of the amount of money they’ve had off me over the years – they should treat me like a king!

Well, the specific story concerns a very explicit customer promise; the promise (stated in their literature) to agree a fixed price with the customer before starting work and to stick to that price.

You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? Yes, that’s right, we agreed a price (around £500) but when I came to collect and pay the price had shot up to £650. This is no mistake about VAT and ex-VAT quotes. This is no mistake about the scope of the work or any argument about what the agreed price had been. This was just a plain recalculation after the agreement on the part of the garage.

Well, to cut a long story short (save me!) I paid up as that was the only way to get my car back (they had the keys); but I made my protest known. The point here, though, was their utter imperviousness to me producing their own literature with their pledge not to do this sort of thing. I thought it was a trump card – they wouldn’t even look at it.

So there were emails back and fro. At first they defended their position, but when I escalated it to the MD of the company, which has a network of garages, he instantly agreed a refund of the overcharge and apologised. But this was only a partial victory really because he wouldn’t except the point about the customer promise. He was magnanimous and humble and expedited the cheque, hoping to retain my custom. But he wouldn’t really except that he was honour bound to do this by dint of his customer promise. He admited it was a miscalculation on their part to have offered me a price lower than they should have according to their own rates – but his approach, he said, would have been to apologise but nonetheless ask me to pay the higher amount – or to meet them halfway ((which I might even have done to be honest)).

One of the best people I’ve worked under was the MD of a former employer who asked all his people to “make a promise, keep a promise” and “do the right thing”. We knew what he meant.

Making and keeping customer promises is a building block of what I would call the “real corporate social responsibility”, and a building block of decent societies.