How to Kill Your Customer And Not Get Punished

By Azuka Onwuka

“Quality excites a customer; sound customer care thrills him; a combination of the two sweeps him off his feet and he is hooked for good.”

In branding, one area that is so simple and yet so neglected is customer care. It is also, perhaps, the most potent branding tool, especially among service brands. Advertising may ensnare a prospect; public relations may persuade him/her; but it is sound customer care that “kills” a customer and makes him/her your “slave.”

Michael and Timothy Mescon say: “Be it furniture, clothes, or health care, many industries today are marketing nothing more than commodities – no more, no less. What will make the difference in the long run is the care and feeding of customer.”

If companies could spend 20 per cent of what they spend on marketing communications on customer care, 80 per cent of their branding problems could be solved.

Dr Michael LeBoeuf, author of How to Win Customers & Keep Them for Life, identifies the Success Syndrome as the greatest threat to business, while noting that rewarding the customer is the Greatest Business Secret in the World. By rewarding the customer, he does not mean bribery and corruption. Rather, he means satisfying the needs of the customer, which in turns makes him to come back again and again, bringing his kith and kin.

The Essence of Branding

The essence of branding is to create a unique culture for a brand which confers a halo on the brand and creates an experience which a customer cannot have with another brand. In a market where there is parity of offerings, it is customer service that makes the difference. Customer care is what makes an airline feel safer to a customer, the meat pie of a fast-food shop tastier, and a telecoms company more reliable.

The Big Mistake

After the Central Bank-induced banking consolidation ended in December 2005, most of the banks have become more aggressive in advertising and branding. Two reasons account for this: (1) through a combination of repeated successful public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, most of the banks have become more financially buoyant; (2) consolidation conferred the big-strong-and-reliable image on all the banks that scaled the hurdle, making exclusive corporate (niche-market) banking unattractive. In a bid to become more attractive to the public, most of the banks changed their logos, colours, office designs, slogans, etc, and increased their visibility through advertising and sponsorships. Yet they did little or nothing to the most important aspect of branding: customer service.

Misleading Ads

Consequently, you get attracted by their beautiful advertisements but get disappointed by their run-of-the-mill service. That is, most banks over-promise and under-deliver, leading to cognitive dissonance (buyer’s remorse), which is the biggest killer of businesses. When you walk into a bank to cash a cheque or make a payment, you see and feel so much discontent from the customers that you wonder if there should be no system put in place for banning misleading advertising. A bank will promise to take you to EL Dorado or Utopia, yet you cannot cash a cheque in the bank in one hour – it may sound like an exaggeration – and yet you cannot get any empathy from the bank staff. If the problem is not that of spending one hour to cash a cheque, it is that of getting the impression that you are a bother for walking into the banking hall. No wonder, some individuals wince when they are given the cheques of particular banks.

Law of 250

Master salesman Joe Girard states in his epic book How to sell Anything to Anybody says that every human being has about 250 people who are so close to him or her to attend their wedding or funeral. He calls it Girard’s Law of 250. Therefore, when a man or woman is disenchanted with a company’s product or service, that individual has about 250 people to tell, each of whom has 250 people to tell, and the negative word-of-mouth marketing continues ad infinitum. And as always, bad news travels faster and longer.

Tend the customer

Recently, one telecoms company was able to win back over a million subscribers by reaching out to them with a little incentive and telling them, “Let’s be friends again.” Customers are human beings, not stones. When customers are shown that they are special, they move from customers to brand enthusiasts and then to brand advocates and brand evangelists.

It is, therefore, only when the external branding is built on a solid foundation, laid upon internal branding, that branding will be effective and achieve not just short-term results but long-term objectives.

“Customers are like the oil palm or the raffia palm. A palm-wine tapper needs to take care of the palm everyday, morning and evening, to get bountiful yield. When he gets to the top of the tree, he does not just collect the palm wine and come down. He takes some time to tend the channel through which the sweet sap flows. As long as he does that, palm wine will ooze out from the tree for several years. But the moment he stops tending the palm, the wine flow ceases.”

* Azuka Onwuka: 20 success Secrets of Great Achievers