Customer Service vs Business Service

You may or may not have noticed a two day absence of blog posts. This was because of an issue with my laptop which meant I needed to get it fixed. This post is more of a general post, rather than related to jobs, its more just about marketing. Enjoy!

Because of the nature of the deal made when buying my laptop I am effectively covered by a business warranty for 3 years. Earlier this year when my power cable died I got a new one sent the very next day. This time I not only got a new power cable I got the entire bottom of the laptop replaced 2 days after I reported the issue (And this was only because the guy bought the wrong part the day before)

Compare this to the tales I have heard of customer warranties and you hear a very different story. It is closer to your standard it will take 2-3 weeks to arrive, parts missing and some things simply not being the companies responsibility. These warranties generally arent cheap either and offer very little.

Now its understandable why a business can get such an exemplary server. Businesses are usually worth big money. In this case my name is tied to a corporate so its unsurpising they want offer a fast efficient service. Often however, particularly in the current economic climate, the choice of the business to go with a company will come down to who offers the best deal, and that usually comes down to money.

In contrast your average home customer will buy for other reasons, efficiency, WOM, belief in the brand or simply previous experience. A home customer is likely to remember bad service and seek to avoid a company for the forseeable future. Admitedly their full lifetime purchases probably wont rival even a percent of a year business contract but if you add them and their street and then the town, region etc it soon becomes a lot higher. The fact is if you provide exemplerary service to a customer which goes beyond their expectation they will remember, they will tell their friends, they may even blog about it or share it on social networking sites. They are likely to purchase again, as well as drive the purchases of countless others. Now clearly in some businesses it may not prove economical to provide such a service to every single customer but it is something to be considered.

For one thing people may be willing to pay more for warranties if they actually believe in them and that may in turn fund the service. A loyal customer is a powerful asset and it does seem sometimes that big corporations who have multi million pound contracts with other corporates ignore this and thus fail to delight the grass roots consumer.