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The quickest way to business failure
OK. I know you aren’t reading this because you want your business to fail. You’re just curious. What is the quickest way to get a business to fail? Be rude! With today’s unforgiving social media reviews, one or two poor customer interactions can do serious harm.
This week I realized just how powerful this truth has become:
For the past two months, my wife and I have been visualizing how to celebrate our 40th anniversary this year. We wanted to return to Hawaii, the place where we honeymooned. Our honeymoon was for 16 days, and we went to five islands. Each trip between islands cost us a day. We had to pack, get to the airport, check in, wait, land, wait, and get transportation to our hotel. After experiencing this routine, we decided that if we ever returned to Hawaii, we would park ourselves on a cruise ship and visit the island while staying put.
We did our research, and found that there was one cruise line that did a tour that originated from Hawaii. We called the cruise line. Naturally, they were very friendly and eager for us to put down a deposit. Before we committed, we decided to read the reviews. It wasn’t long before we came across a review that talked about a rude encounter with a crew member. That put up a red flag. We read on. We found another story that was similar. That was it. Thumbs down.
We are now looking forward to a cruise that brings us back to the Caribbean, and we are just as excited as we were for Hawaii. Sorry cruise line. Sorry Hawaii. We are not about to risk a bad experience for our 40th anniversary.
This experience leaves me with these thoughts: The two crew members who did not interact properly undoubtedly had no idea of how their insensitivity would magnify around the world. It does folks. It all goes back to the concept of “moments of truth.” If you have 1000 employees who have an average of 5 customer interactions per day, that is 5000 moments of truth. Everyone of them counts. We need to be relentless in our pursuit of excellent customer service.