“The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other going in opposite directions.” George Carlin
Back when I was new to the business world, when research meant going to the library and all information came from reading the newspaper and watching the evening news (one hour only) the Wall Street Journal ran a series of one-page, thought-provoking pieces. Today they would be a blog but this was a couple of decades before Mr. Gore invented the internet.
One that has always stuck with me was titled “We flatties don’t come back”. Flatties is a term used by carnival people (county fair type not cruise line type, though it might apply) to describe their customers. The life of a carny is short-term in every sense and their only goal is to survive this town to go to the next one. They have no interest in “getting to know their customer”. What they want is to extract as much as they can as quick as they can and get on to the next person, place or thing.
The gist of the article was that companies that treat their customers like carnival flatties will one day find themselves without any customers to worry about.
I promised in a recent post to never again complain about the airline industry. So I have this story about a company in the transportation business whose name implies either a variance between two numbers or a swampy region between two rivers in the South.
I used to frequent this transportation company and they once gave me a number in which to keep track of how much I transported myself with them. Let’s call them T1. Now they have bought another transportation company that I have also frequented and thus also have a number. Let’s call them T2.
So T1 wants me to merge my information from T2 into their system. Easy enough except to do so requires a personal identification number. The last time I used T1 for transportation was before personal identification numbers existed. So, since I’ve never had one I have been locked out of their system. No service representative has been able to help, no email has been answered and when I asked for the number of the group that handles these things I was actually told, “You can’t call them. I can’t even call them. We can only communicate with them via email”.
“Can I get their email address?”
“No”
NO ONE GETS IN TO SEE THE WIZARD, NOT NO ONE, NOT NO HOW!!!!
Talk about feeling like a flattie?
So?
How are you doing with your customers? Are they a treasure or a ball and chain? Are they an ally or an enemy? Are they a flattie?
In a time when getting new customers is, as my mother would say, “like pulling hens teeth” the last thing you can afford to do is lose good customers.
Back when I was new to the business world, when research meant going to the library and all information came from reading the newspaper and watching the evening news (one hour only) the Wall Street Journal ran a series of one-page, thought-provoking pieces. Today they would be a blog but this was a couple of decades before Mr. Gore invented the internet.
One that has always stuck with me was titled “We flatties don’t come back”. Flatties is a term used by carnival people (county fair type not cruise line type, though it might apply) to describe their customers. The life of a carny is short-term in every sense and their only goal is to survive this town to go to the next one. They have no interest in “getting to know their customer”. What they want is to extract as much as they can as quick as they can and get on to the next person, place or thing.
The gist of the article was that companies that treat their customers like carnival flatties will one day find themselves without any customers to worry about.
I promised in a recent post to never again complain about the airline industry. So I have this story about a company in the transportation business whose name implies either a variance between two numbers or a swampy region between two rivers in the South.
I used to frequent this transportation company and they once gave me a number in which to keep track of how much I transported myself with them. Let’s call them T1. Now they have bought another transportation company that I have also frequented and thus also have a number. Let’s call them T2.
So T1 wants me to merge my information from T2 into their system. Easy enough except to do so requires a personal identification number. The last time I used T1 for transportation was before personal identification numbers existed. So, since I’ve never had one I have been locked out of their system. No service representative has been able to help, no email has been answered and when I asked for the number of the group that handles these things I was actually told, “You can’t call them. I can’t even call them. We can only communicate with them via email”.
“Can I get their email address?”
“No”
NO ONE GETS IN TO SEE THE WIZARD, NOT NO ONE, NOT NO HOW!!!!
Talk about feeling like a flattie?
So?
How are you doing with your customers? Are they a treasure or a ball and chain? Are they an ally or an enemy? Are they a flattie?
In a time when getting new customers is, as my mother would say, “like pulling hens teeth” the last thing you can afford to do is lose good customers.
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