Bye Bye Anonymity, Part 1

It wasn't that long ago that we didn't have a clue who bought and used our products and services.  Think about it for a second; in walks a person to a convenience store.  She buys a single serve diet Pepsi and a bag of Lay's Baked potato chips.  And then she is gone. PepsiCo has no idea who she is and neither did the 7-11, where she bought both of them.  She had come and gone and both PepsiCo and 7-11 counted her as a positive sale.  All good, right?

Well, maybe not so good because while driving away from the store she opened the diet Pepsi only to find that it was flat and date expired.  She had already opened the chips and started to eat them, which were fine, but she was so upset with the Pepsi being flat that recognizing that Frito-Lay and Pepsi are the same company, she started finding problems with the chips to support her anger.  They were too salty, broken and the bag was not filled, or so she had made up in her mind.

A few minutes later when she gets to her house, she takes a picture of both the bottle and the bag (in an unflattering pose) and posts the pictures with some not so kind of words about both of them as well as 7-11 as the retailer.  This young woman happens to be a good and creative writer so her Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts blow up and within the next 12 hours over a hundred thousand people are piling on with their complaints with the three companies. And to think, Pepsi, Frito-Lay, 7-11 never even knew her.

This is not a farfetched scenario. It happens every day, all day long.

If the first time we are going to get to know a customer is through a complaint, the shoe is already on the wrong foot.  Consider that we can get ahead of this type of introduction by finding ways to engage and lose the anonymity be inviting our customers into a relationship earlier and then keeping it alive with positive dialogue.

 More tomorrow on this...

(For a further faith based exploration of this post you can visit: http://purposedworking.blogspot.com/2013/07/day-1184-bye-bye-anonimity-part-1.html )