A Recipe For Disaster

For all of us running our own business we have come across disgruntled customers and most of us employ the philosophy that "the customer is always right". Well what about when the customer isn't right, or the customer says one thing and does another.

We have found in our coaching and consulting that the best way to teach something or explain something is by example, so here is the scenario.

We spoke with a former customer about making a major purchase with us, they gave us their credit card information and since the weekend was around the corner ran the card shortly thereafter. The customer was going on vacation and we were going out of town that weekend.

Later that evening we got a call from this customer kind of jumbled but something about how he remembered why he couldn't do something he told us he could. While we weren't happy, we figured we would talk to them upon our return. The next day we get another message from this customer saying, don't run the card and basically what sounded like to us they were backing out of the transaction. Since we have been doing business with this individual for over 6 years, it was the last thing we ever expected. To say we were a little ticked is an understatement, considering we had another individual we could have made the offer to, and this individual found something else in the interim. So we had lost out on both counts.

We wrote a polite but firm email to this customer informing them we would progress the refund once the transaction went through minus any penalties and told them how disappointed we were and how we never expected them to go back on their word. We waited 24 hours before sending it, re-read it again and then sent it. Why did we wait 24 hours, well because sometimes the next day we feel differently about things.

Many years ago I worked for a woman who had a tendency to get riled up, fire off letters on her Dictaphone or write them up and then asked us to type up and send. We all learned to wait 24 hours before sending her letters. We would go to her the next day and ask her if she still wanted to send the letter. Seven out of ten times, she didn't or she made major changes to it.

So always use the 24 hour rule when writing emails or letters of this sort.

Fast forward to the individual's return from vacation and we get a message about how they can't believe the email and how we reacted and so on. However, they realized that they weren't very clear and they wanted to move forward with the transaction and told us not to do the refund.

Well considering we were still waiting for everything to go through the customer lucked out.

So why the long out drawn out story, because sometimes the "customer isn't right" and they make mistakes or have bad days. In this case, the customer had just finished dealing with some personal financial issues with people who weren't doing their job, so we got the garbled messages and hence what we thought was backing out. The customer didn't want to back out, just wanted us to hold off charging the card, which, of course, we couldn't since we had already done so. So there was lots of miscommunication on the part of the customer and us interpreting it.

We spoke to this customer and we got the whole story of what had happened before they called us and we are in the process of moving forward with the transaction.

What have we learned here today:

1. The customer isn't always right.

2. Always wait 24 hours before sending out an email or letter to a customer.

3. Always follow up with a telephone call and see if you can discuss what occurred and repair the relationship. This is not always possible. We were lucky as the customer acknowledged they were behind the problems that occurred. What also helped was our six year relationship with this customer. We were not only business owner and customer but also became friends over the years.

We hope that the following avoids any Recipes for Disaster in your business.

Copyright DeFiore Enterprises 2007

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