The Internet - Magnifying the Old Rule That One Unhappy Customer Tells Ten People
13 August 2006Getting Out of Debt has posted about a bad customer experience at Blockbuster Video over at her blog. Basically, they lost a DVD in the store and claimed she’d never returned it. They took her card, cut it up, and then when they’d found the DVD again they refused to issue a new one without ID. I worked at Blockbuster some time ago and unless the policies have changed, it just sounds like unhelpful employees - you could easily rent a person a video without their ID, and the idea that a video could not be somewhere in the store is just silly. We often had customers move things around and put videos in random places, mistakenly grab stuff from behind the counter, or do other ridiculous things - so it’s strange that they pretended it was an impossible scenario.
More importantly, the fact that the incident is getting blogged about is an important lesson for people who have their own business: dissatisfied customers are a bigger problem than ever. Many E-bay sellers find this out the hard way, as only a few unhappy customers can destroy their business. If you have a regular small business, anyone can put up a blog entry or web site about how you treated them. You’ll never be able to avoid bad feedback entirely - sometimes it is indeed the customer who’s wrong. But if you act unreasonably, don’t expect the word not to get out. The case of the guy who taped AOL refusing to cancel his service and made national news when he put the call on the Internet shows the same thing.
Discuss this on the Free the Drones Business Forums.
One Response to “The Internet - Magnifying the Old Rule That One Unhappy Customer Tells Ten People”
December 16th, 2007 at 3:29 am
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce