Delivering satisfaction (and fish and chips)
A lot of people who don’t have a business think that there isn’t a difference between a large one and a small one except in scale. But managing and running a small business is nothing like big business.
I have had difficulties dealing with large businesses such as the telecoms giants. If I didn’t know before, I know now that they don’t much care what an individual customer feels about them and very often they will treat the “small person” with contempt. After all, the fall-out and any losses incurred when an individual customer moves on leaves hardly a scratch when you have a big marketing budget and TV campaign and you can lure more people in with special cheap introductory offers. No need to mention the long and onerous contract and the twelve month notice period for anyone wanting to change.
Those of us running a small business know that our business is personal. We need to make sure that every customer or client is not only happy with our service, but absolutely delighted. That way we keep our customers and we get recommended. If something goes wrong in our process we must fix it immediately because we need all our good customers and they are our best marketing tool.
Telecoms companies and utilities can make all sorts of promises and can afford “wastage” of their customers who leave them because of their failures. We cannot afford to let people down because we would lose them and let ourselves down too. We must not make promises we can’t keep.
