Should you be obsessed about delighting customers?
Babar wrote a little while ago about Sprint’s fiasco about cancelling the accounts of 1000 people.
Apparently that has become quite a controversy, and Seth Godin recently wrote about this in his blog. His take quoted below:
I’ve gotten a lot of email about: Sprint may cancel your service if you call customer service too often.
Apparently, about 1,000 people got this note. They weren’t
delinquent in their bills, but they were calling in and complaining
approximately 25 times a month.If you’re going to be obsessed with delighting customers, it’s a lot
more efficient to focus on customers that are able to be delighted.
That sounds like a tautology, but it’s actually a guiding principle for
successful businesses. Hire nice people and attract satisfiable, gabby
customers. Why not?These 1000 people were actually happy to be unhappy. They were
unpleasable, and they weren’t helping either word of mouth or the
ability of the call center folks to do good work.
I think the mistake Sprint made was in only giving people one day’s notice. I probably would have given them a month or so…Turns out Sprint even gave them one month’s notice.What would happen if you fired (nicely) the very few customers that
take your best effort but rarely appreciate it or spread the word?

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