Hey, I just made a post about an awful customer service experience with TheKnot and WeddingChannel, and than it occured to me that I had just read Rich Schefren’s report about the very same thing! In this well written report, he talks about how truly horrendous customer service has affected even large companies, to the point of bringing them to their knees. That’s not my goal here, but it’s interesting that in this day and age, bad customer service simply doesn’t pay off.
For as long as I can remember, we’ve always treaded all our customers as friends. That means speed service, always a refund when asked, etc … do whatever is necessary to keep the customer happy (and that’s not always easy). Some customers can be quite hard, and quite hard to deal with, so I hired people to do this for me. One crazy customer can ruin your day, so I no longer do it myself, but the thought remains – do whatever you need to do to make sure people are happy. Live life in a positive way, and do business in the same vein.
Have we lost money treating people as well as we do? Sure we have! Has my temparature skyrocketed when I believe I’m being taken advantage of? Sure it does! Will it stop me from treating our customers as freinds? Likely not! Customer wins, end of story. We go so far out of our way to have happy customers that we’ve often lost money doing it. It’s just the way it has to be. Didn”t you ever see the Secret? 
We get very few returns, since we have stellar products, but we still get some! Crazy as it sounds, some of these returns have turned into our greatest fans! If you haven’t seen the Internet Marketing Attention Age Doctrine I do recommend reading it. It’s free, and an interesting comment on where the world of business and marketing is heading!
In the report, he gives an example of 5 companies that were truly affected by Web 2.0, and bad customer service.
