I think one of the greatest reasons for the boom in on-line shopping is not having to deal with the people who run businesses we actually still walk in to. In many cases it’s like they are doing us a favor by being there and that’s it.
I’m sorry, if I walk in to your business to spend my money I think you have to live up to your end of the bargain, and that’s providing good service. It’s also nice if you actually act like you are glad to have a customer in your store.
Bad service example: I was in a large home improvement store looking for something. They paged for help and I waiting for help for over 20 minutes. I could have been lying on the floor bleeding and they wouldn’t have noticed, let alone offered any help.
Good service example: My wife and I were at the car dealership today and in the span of 10 minutes at least half a dozen people came up to us and asked if someone was helping us or if we needed anything.
That’s one of the goals of our website watchbuy.com. We are striving to offer great customer service. If you love it, let us know, if not, we need to hear about that too.
The customer has so many choices these days. Even on the Internet it’s possible to get bad service. Many of us buy things that don’t show up, or when they do they aren’t what we expected. I like to deal with companies that actually care about the customer. When a business gets to big sometimes they lose sight of that. And we all know that there isn’t much we can do about it, except take our business elsewhere.
Maybe it’s unrealistic to expect the guy or gal making minimum wage to breath the corporate message that the customer is important, but when I go to a business where I’m treated poorly, and six months later the door is locked and the "for lease" sign is in the window I wonder if that had something to do with it.
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George Siegal is the co-creator of watchnbuy.com. You can contact George at
george@watchnbuy.com.