Excalibur

I’m a customer that sucks – but all in the best possible taste!

I sometimes wonder what all this customer-orientation palaver is about. When I see how my family and I sometimes behave as customers, I wonder how any supplier puts up with us. Take yesterday for example. My wife came back yesterday afternoon from our grocery supermarket with a nice piece of fresh cod. Not for me, I hasten to add – I’d been well fed at a seminar earlier that day and two cooked meals a day is too much for me. So, I was giving my usual moral support in the kitchen when she screamed, “A worm, a worm!” I looked closely and indeed there it was – a small, curled up, white worm. I restrained myself from making my usual comment, “free meat”, on the grounds that the weight of the worm had been included. We rushed back to the supermarket, and I waited outside while my wife went in to beat them up. She came back fuming. “I only got back what I paid for – nothing for my trouble. And what’s more, he was really rude to me – he said it was natural. You write them a letter!” I went to see the supervisor and got the name of the assistant. You tell head office what I think of them.

As she settled down to eat a rapidly concocted meal from the previous day’s left-overs, I thought, “Let’s see whether the shop assistant was right”. My computer was already on, so I logged on to the Web and keyed “cod worms health risk” into my search engine. And guess what! These worms, whose Latin name I can’t remember, are also known as “cod worms”. They are natural, as natural as insects in lettuce – my usual source of free meat. However, the site did say that you might want to take any infested fish back to the shop so they can check others. They are not dangerous and are killed by freezing or proper cooking –which is why the main risk comes from sushi. And even if you eat a live one, it’s normally killed by your digestive juices, but on rare occasions does burrow its way through your intestinal wall, when it can cause trouble.

My wife did a bit more checking. Today, while buying flowers for a friend in a rival supermarket, she popped over to the fish counter to ask about cod worms. The shop assistant, intrigued by her query, answered, “Yes, you’re right. They are natural. But we deworm them.” This worried my wife even more – he wouldn’t say what the process was. Chemicals? Heat? Quick freezing? Are the bodies left in? Looks like we won’t be eating much cod for a while.

This episode prompted me to muse on our behaviour as customers. This was a good demonstration of the capacity of the Web to help customers manage themselves better, to the benefit of both supplier and customer. So why don’t suppliers use this approach more? Big retailers haven’t done a bad job. Boots’ “Well-being” approach to educating customers is very sensible. I wondered whether there is another reason. Some customers (like me, of course!) use the Web to help suppliers help them. Some use it to get the best possible price deal. Yet others use it to get one up on the supplier. Still others use it to find chinks in the security of organisations that they are targeting for some misdeed.

What the Web has done is to free us customers to show our best and our worst instincts (from the point of view of suppliers, or indeed the law). And I’m not just referring to pornography and related subjects (though I must admit that the storm of e-mails offering to enlarge a certain part of my anatomy makes me wonder how the rumour got around that I needed it!). The Web is like a padded room. You can do anything – well almost anything - you want on it without it affecting the rest of your life (unless you want it to, by clicking on the “buy” button). It is the great liberator. It’s changed our family’s banking, household and motor insurance, telecommunications, travel, holiday and entertainment buying behaviour completely, i.e. for big, intermittent decisions – changing supplier, buying a new category of product. “Let’s see what’s on offer” is the cry in our family. In the last year, my family has used the Web (sometimes in conjunction with call centres or e-mail) to open a new savings account, buy low cost airline flights, motor insurance, three short breaks, a cruise, telephone calling cards, as well as to manage nearly all its day-to-day banking. We’ve used it once to make a complaint to a restaurant about rough-edged furniture that caught on clothes and pulled stitches out. It worked – we had a lovely letter back saying we were absolutely right, that they’d sanded down and varnished the furniture and were pleased to offer us a free bottle of wine at the next visit. This was good for both, because it’s the only chain we’ve found that meets our needs and my wife was reluctant to return until they’d sorted the problem. So we continue to go once or twice a month. Amazingly, the waitress did her best to destroy the brilliant impression created by the manager – she read the letter offering the wine and said about her manager, “Oh, he’s nuts!”

Of course, if any of our new suppliers wants to move beyond that first decision with us, they’d better make us a special offer, or be the best deal on the market, or excellent value (like the restaurant), not simply offer us the honour of a continued relationship with us. The nice thing is – some of them have got the message. My short-break and phone card suppliers e-mail me special offers, although I must admit that these normally prompt me to go back to the Web to see if they are really special. My bank hasn’t got it, of course. That’s because it doesn’t collect my e-mail address from its website.

Another use we’ve found is to keep a check on our chronically incompetent health service. We now never expect any member of the health service with whom we come into contact to explain anything to us. Indeed these people have got to do a lot to convince us that they’re not just making it up as they go along. We simply check that we’ve understood the relevant symptoms, confirm or reject the diagnosis, and ask the doctor to prescribe what we need. We’ve got access to all the information we need – the patient websites of the most hypochondriac nation in the world, the United States. Cyberchondria rules in our house.

So, suppliers, carry on the good work. Keep liberating us. Build your marketing strategies on the behaviour documented on the “customerssuck” websites. Get rid of your finely tuned marketing ideas and just make sure you make yourselves easy to buy, and make sure the offers you make to us are relevant, timely and CHEAP AND SPECIAL. I don’t want your brand (actually I take it as given, so I do want it really, but express it in what you deliver to me, not what you promise me), I want your discounts!