Wake Up Big Corporations, These Are Your Customers Speaking

Have you ever felt really peeved when a supermarket decides not to sell an item that you’ve tried from their store, liked it, and then incorporated it into your general shopping requirements? Or perhaps an own-brand item from a pharmacy that is not only cheaper than anything else on the market but also does the job so much better, and then the pharmacy decide to withdraw that product? Or maybe you’ve put yourself out to support a local farm shop and buy much of their produce which isn’t particularly competitive but nice quality and their home cured ham is exceptional, well worth the 20 mile trip every now and again, and then that shop replaces their home cured ham with ordinary supermarket ham at the same price?

If the answer to any of the above questions is YES then you will be among many thousands of shoppers who feel they have been let down by a company that they have supported.

Many big companies especially seem to have lost touch with their customers and actually treat their customers with contempt and really couldn’t care less about individual customers; the bottom line profit figure is the only thing that counts.

If a supermarket takes off its shelves an own-brand item that is popular with the local community because it is not producing as much profit as a well known brand, it will start to alienate its customer base; particularly in the supermarket business, there is a lot of competition around, and it only takes a few customers to become disenchanted with a supermarket they use and start trying out one or more other supermarkets, before the profits start to fall from the original supermarket. They will tell their friends about another supermarket and before long a small trickle of exiting customers becomes a stream.

A similar sort of thing has happened whereby big corporations have thought that they were being so clever by saving a lot of money by outsourcing certain services, for example call centers, to countries with cheaper wage bills; in the short term this policy does appear to be good, but what about the customers?

Pretty well anyone that you talk to will say that they get confused and frustrated when dealing with foreign call centers, not for any racist reasons but purely because most people at the foreign call centers may be able to speak their language pretty well but they still have a difficult-to-understand accent and they are not aware of the way of speaking, mannerisms, humor, etc in a particular country. It is pretty well universally agreed that people in call centers should be brought up and educated in the same country as the people they are supporting. Many banks in the UK are finally waking up to public reaction to call centers.

So these corporations using foreign call centers will eventually become losers, big time, when one or more of their competitors realize that satisfied customers are the corner stone of their business and that if their business is built on a shaky foundation of bottom-line profits, then a small tremor in public feeling and awareness could bring their whole corporation down.