By Davin Broadbent

If you’re anything like us and you provide a service for your customers, in our case it’s Marketing, Creative and Design then you know how important it is to make sure your customers are happy. Happy customers mean repeat business, word of mouth advertising and importantly a better working relationship. Who doesn’t want those things? Well it was a shock to learn recently that our local dry cleaner (we won’t name names) doesn’t give a flying f@#k about good customer service, apparently because we need him and he does such an amazing job.

Now If I told you that once a week for a reasonable price I could impeccably clean your clothing, never rip or tear or lose a garment and deliver this on time as promised every time, most people would say where do I sign. The catch (and there is always a catch) is that I get to be as rude, standoffish and borderline insulting as I like because I am confident that you will not get a better deal within 50km. The irony (no pun intended) is that it seems to work. The dry cleaner is always busy and people don’t mind the rudeness because the results are amazing. As long as the results stay amazing I am confident they will continue to do great business.

This got me thinking, are there other service providers or businesses that could get away with this sort of behaviour? Take Apple for example (please don’t sue me Steve) and their IPhone/IPad phenomena. They get you hooked (you can draw your own analogy) hold back stock to create artificial demand and then they force you to use Itunes, don’t support flash, hold back design so they can release new versions with one or two more features etc. Of course Apple is not necessarily rude, but they do seem to come across as a benevolent dictator. What about emergency plumbers? They can be as rude as they like and we would never throw them out of our homes or risk being up to our eyeballs is the proverbial. Taxi drivers, they are poor and downtrodden and no wonder they are miserable, but on a cold rainy night if you’re lucky enough to find one, you will gladly throw away the freshly bought kebab if told to. You will also gladly ride for 45 minutes listening to the Bombay top 40 while he talks to his friend in another language on his hands free. These are just a few examples of average customer service; I have avoided the elephant in the room (koff koff Government koff) because there is not enough space in 50 blogs to adequately describe the contempt with which they treat their customers.

The question is, if customer service is really that important how do these and other organisations get away with apparently disregarding it? Well they don’t. It doesn’t matter if you are a massive organisation or a tiny dry cleaner, if customer dissatisfaction reaches a critical level, your goods or services will be replaced. People vote, use social media and face to face conversations to rate these organisations and there is a fine line between value and satisfaction. So even if you have a monopoly on a product or service; if you choose to treat your customers badly; competition will eventually erode your market share.

So before you leap over your desk and tell the next client you see to F#@k off, ask yourself, “am I so secure in my market that I can afford to upset a customer?”