Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Treat customers fairly

In the past, businesses were worried about their reputation. If they received a bad report in the newspapers about how badly they treated their customers, they would have taken immediate steps to rectify the bad image.

In recent times, businesses are not concerned about their reputation, for the following reasons:
a) Bad treatment of customers is quite common among their competitors as well
b) If some customers go away, they can use marketing to reach out to new customers (who may not be aware about their reputation)
c) The newspapers are less active in highlighting bad service, as they depend on the advertising revenue of these businesses.
What can consumers do? They should judge a business according to its record of treating customers well. If the business is too focused on making more profit, then they are likely to neglect their customers.
Tan Kin Lian


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

One more observation. Customer always expects excellent service nowadays. When excellent service is rendered, customer takes it for granted. Some will expect the level of excellent service rendered to go higher next time they protronise. But, what happens after the customer gets his/her excellent service? They often leave without a word of appreciation !!!
From the perspective of service staff: No appreciation, no regconition. And also same pay as those who do not render excellent service. So, why bother give excellent service.

Student said...

Mr Tan,

In US, consumers fight back by posting their unpleasant experiences with businesses on the website http://consumerist.com/.

Perhaps having a similar website in sg will improve the customer experience.

Stephen said...

Singapores very tough defamation laws make it difficult to report certain types of financial investments as frauds or scams. The land banking industry and timeshare industry is full of such cases but these companies cannot be named until they fail or run away with the money.

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