No Lines, No Waiting

Fortune interview on customer service in the downturn

Taking an ecosystem view of your world can help understand the nasty lasting impact of cutbacks in customer experience. Case in point: during a downturn sales decline because buyers aren’t buying; the ecosystem’s not flush with nutrients. By definition that aspect of your ecosystem will improve when the downturn ends. But if you soil yourself when times are tough, your position can be a lot harder to clean up later.

Voices from high places continue to warn about this. Yesterday’s online edition of Fortune, on CNNMoney.com, has an interview with author Emily Yellin (newly on Twitter as @EYellin) about how broken our customer service thinking has become. The title of her book shows the unspoken message that people get when service is crummy: “Your call is [not that] important to us.”

In the Fortune interview she raises two points we’ve discussed here:

• “As companies start to compete about price, service is going to be the one differentiator.”

I don’t know that I’d agree it’s the only differentiator, but it’s certainly a conspicuous one with big ties to customer satisfaction. (See Customer Experience has “direct link with loyalty” (4/28) and Customer Service Matters, 5/14.)

• “It’s not as easy to get away with giving bad service these days with the rise of the big megaphone that the Internet has given customers.”

Yep: that’s our series on the new post-Cluetrain world of “Customer Experience is not just post-sale.”

Look, it’s like any other relationship: you find out who somebody is when the chips are down. Prove your mettle. If you plan to survive this thing, plan for then. Think ecosystem, not just today’s balance sheet.

In the coming weeks I’ll be looking for real-world examples from past downturns to illustrate this. If you have any, send ‘em in!

Posted by Dave deBronkart