Almost every company talks about the importance of customer service, but aligning that talk with action is often a different story.
The gap is even larger if you consider the way companies act toward people who aren’t customers. Many companies surprisingly aren’t especially inviting toward people who may be considering doing business with them.
Take banks. The other day, I brought a couple fistfuls of change to a community banks with plans to use their coin-counting machine. My primary bank doesn’t offer this service (which I’ve mentioned there before to no avail), but I’ve used the local bank’s coin machines several times without any questions or problems.
On this visit, a teller told me that since I was not a customer, there’d be a 5 percent fee for tossing my nickels and dimes into their machine. That’s less than the machines at the grocery store, but it’s 5 percent more than they’ve charged me on previous visits.
I explained this discrepancy to the teller, who said I’d escaped the charge in the past only through a mistake, and that a fee should’ve been assessed.
Granted, the bank paid for its coin-counting machine, but it struck me as an odd approach to say friendly service for a non-customer was provided only in error.
I took my coins across the street to a branch of a large Canadian bank, where I was allowed to use their coin-counting machine (and could’ve filled my pockets with pens and lollipops while I waited). A junior banker and I had a very soft-sell conversation about the advantages of banking with them, and I took my cash.
I wasn’t in the market for another checking account, but I left the friendly bank with a much more favorable impression of their services than those of the snotty local bank. The small amount of revenue the friendly bank bypassed by allowing me to use their machine is likely to be repaid in favorable word-of-mouth as I recount this story among friends, and could provide direct revenue should I open an account there.
In your company, it makes sense that you’d treat loyal customers differently than random people off the street. But being nice to those random people could be a valuable first step toward converting them into customers.
