Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

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I always enjoy encountering a situation where a company surprises me with an improved customer experience.  It means that they have taken the time to think about customers, particularly Best Customers, and have made some steps, however small, to connect with me.  When I see this, I am always willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sometimes, however, they can’t seem to win for trying.

Last weekend, I walked into my local Home Depot store, and was pleasantly surprised to see a sign at the door reinforcing the commitment of the store manager to “exceeding my expectations every time your visit our store.”  Home Depot was clearly using some Best Practices, making the store manager the hero and personalizing the company in the eyes of their customers.  They even had a picture of their store manager on the sign, so I could recognize her for good measure (BTW — pretty cool that a Home Depot had a woman store manager).  Here is what the sign looked like:

All well and good.  I appreciated the effort, and began to make my way into the store.

But wait!  Something was missing, something that would undercut the store manager’s promise.  How could they sabotage their moving commitment to exceeding customer expectations?  Take a closer look the sign, below:

Do you see what I see?  Or do you see what I see missing, to be more precise?  The message says that if for any reason they did not exceed my expectations, that I was to contact the store manager directly by taking a business card from the sign.  Only — There are no cards on the sign at all.

Now, I am forced to come to one of two conclusions:

1. The store manager did not really mean it, and did not put out any cards to avoid calls
2. So many people took the cards that the sign ran “out of stock”

Those are the only two conclusions I can make, as far as I can see.  This sign is a great example of how hard real customer commitment is, and how detail oriented you have to be make sure that the message comes off as true and authentic.

With every customer, this authenticity is critical — with best customers, it is even more so, since they represent such a disproportionate share of company revenue and profit.

Details are critical to building a Best Customer relationship in a scalable manner.  Ignore the details and your customers will sense it in a blink of an eye and you are likely to pay the price in both the short and long-term.

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• Home Depot Drives Away Another Customer Forever [Delays] (consumerist.com)
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Tagged as: Best Customer, Customer experience, Customer service