Stop
me if I’ve written about this before, but it’s one of those things
that seem to stick in my craw, or is it my crawl…whatever. Anyway,
with the economy seeming to slow down a tad, perhaps we can start to
get better service from the folks where we buy things. I mean if
you’ve got a company that’s got all of the business it can handle
then you might not want to answer my call or listen to me when I
come into your store. On the other hand, if you need some business,
well, here I am. As an illustration of what I’m talking about,
listen to this.
The
other day I’m looking in the paper and notice 4 or 5 duplexes for
sale in my area. I take down the numbers and call the agents the
next day. None of them are in the office at the time I call, so I
leave a voice mail message asking them to either call me back or fax
me some information on the pieces they have advertised in the paper.
So, how many do you think either called back or faxed me the poop?
Not one, zero, zip. Maybe they sold them already, who knows? But,
you’d think someone there would have the courtesy of at least
calling and asking if there was something else you might be
interested in seeing, wouldn’t you? I suppose the economy is so good
that they don’t need any more people than they
already have, so why bother?
My
question is this, do they just exist off of the customer base they
have now and are depending on that to keep them going year after
year? What happens when that long standing customer base starts to
dwindle away? I’m constantly amazed at the amount of money that some
firms throw into advertising for new customers then don’t have the
resources to handle the new business they generate. It would seem to
me that if you spent a gazillion bucks on some commercial, then you
might want to give some thought to being able to handle the increase
in volume the commercial might bring to you. No one likes to be put
on hold or in voice mail hell for 30 minutes because, "We are
experiencing an overload of customer calls at this time."
I
was in a car rental company the other day, and discovered they were
all sold out and had nothing to rent. I don’t know why I was
surprised since it was about the 2nd or 3rd time this has happened
to me. I asked if there was some convention or big event going on
that seemed to cause all of their cars to be rented. They looked at
me like a calf looking at a new gate and told me ."No, we don’t
have any idea what’s going on." Now, if I had a place like this
I think I would try to either have more vehicles to rent or
something. Obviously, these folks were just as content as they could
be renting out their fleet and not having anything to do for the
rest of the day.
You
can always tell who doesn’t own the place by the way they answer the
question. "How’s business?" If the place employees people
who don’t care about their work. you’ll hear, "Oh, we’re just
way too busy, or all of us are just working too hard." I can
tell you a lot of dot-com businesses would just love to be able to
say they had more business than they could handle at this time. It
would behoove any company who wanted to stay in business to try and
see how difficult is it for anyone to do business with them. I’d
suggest they call into their own voice mail system and see how fast
anyone helps them with a problem. I’ll bet once they get put on hold
for an hour or so or treated as rudely as we all been from time to
time, they’d want to make some changes. Or at least I hope they
would. But then you never know, some people don’t think that way…
they just think we’ll all be around forever. I hate to say it, but
they are wrong. Write to me at www.pearyperry.com.
