Chapter 1: The Road Less Traveled When Marketing The Small Business

What's Wrong with Business?

Just for a minute, forget you are a small business owner or business person and think about how satisfied or dissatisfied you are with the majority of companies that you do business with.

What are you coming up with? It is not that much to write home about, is it? And that is a problem for every one of those organizations. You just don't like them that much.

Now, some of the people who are reading this right now may be thinking of organizations that are operated by other readers of this same blog. Scary, huh? Someone is really thinking about why organizations like yours just don't make them feel valued.

Hornstein Associates, a marketing firm in Connecticut, conducts a survey each year and rates how companies respond to inquiries to their Customer Service departments. From the response rate by the organizations solicited, the results can give us some idea of how these businesses (and business in general) are responding to stated inquiries by customers who ask a question of them.

At your next cocktail party, solicit stories about bad customer service: everyone has a nightmare.

It works really simply. Hornstein Associates sends an inquiry to the Customer Service departments of some of the largest and most successful organizations in the world: Financial Times' "World's Most Respected Companies" and to Fortune's "Most Admired Companies" with a question about their customer service. The goal is to see whether the organizations will respond within a 24-hour period, the expectation of most consumers when they contact a company's customer service department. The question is "What is your corporate policy regarding the turnaround time for emails addressed to customer service?" A simple question for an organization who makes customer service a true priority, right?

What Hornstein has found since 2002 is a shocking decline is customer service among organizations that most of the world thinks of as great organizations. The percentage of organizations that responded within a 24-hour period in 2002 was 63%. In 2003 it was 59% and in 2004, it plummeted to 37%. 2005 and 2006 rebounded somewhat and leveled at 42% for both years. Then in 2007, the number dropped to 33%. Last year, we hit an all-time low of 31%, just less than half of the response in 2002.

Is anyone surprised? I doubt it. We have become so accustomed to bad customer service that this sort of thing doesn't surprise us at all. In fact, at your next cocktail party, solicit stories about bad customer service: everyone has a nightmare.

So, what's to be done about how our organizations serve our customers? Something had better change, huh?

Thanks for reading. More to come.