A story about a rug
About two weeks ago my wife and I bought a carpet from a local carpet store, we were going to use it in the baby’s room that we are now prepping for the baby’s arrival. It was the only room in our house where they original wood flooring had not been refinished so we decided to get the floors refinished as well and then put the carpet down over them. But once we got the floors refinished we realized we didn’t want to cover them up with a carpet any longer so I placed a call back to the carpet store to ask them if they would give us a refund even though they had cut this carpet specifically for us. The sales person was great, he was super nice and super helpful in a way which you usually only find in a small town business or store. He let us off the hook and gave a full refund (minus the cutting costs – around $10). We would have totally understood if he didn’t want to provide the refund, he had every right to make us eat the $160 we spend on the rug, but he didn’t, he went the extra few steps to make us happy.
So now we’re looking at a smaller rug to fill the space, so that we can still see the wood flooring. However, we aren’t looking at that store again. Turns out that while they offer amazing service and great sales people, they are SUPER expensive compared to big box stores or online retailers. It’s really not fun as the customer, because I want to give the business back to them so bad, but I cannot let myself pay 50-200% more in the name of “good service.” This really got me thinking.
Not all about service?
Service is truly the next big differentiator, I mean, in a way it always has been one of the biggest places to find differentiation for your business. But now, in the wake of many tech companies outsourcing technical and other support services, it seems to be coming very much back into the spot light.
That being said, it’s not all about service, it never has been. It’s still very much about price as well. I think these two things work together in a customers mind like this: “If I pay a lot, I should get good customer service, if I don’t pay a lot I should not expect good customer service.” This is how you explain why walmart customers don’t care when they have to step over cardboard boxes in the aisles, yet whole foods’ customers would get upset if the peppers are not fully stocked, or someone cannot answer your question about the sourcing of fish or meat. Walmart customers expect crappy service, whole foods customers pay extra expecting great service.
The promised land
So the true promised land then seems to be if you could somehow offer low prices and good (or even exceptional) customer service. No customers would expect such good service at such a price point, which in-turn makes most of them very happy with what they are getting for their money.
It seems like a really tough spot to try and find but I feel like the path to this promised land lies in the scale offered by the internet and technology. We can scale things so crazy well with the internet as our primary business channel and tools offered by tech advances. We can stop thinking in terms of tradeoffs between cost and service as there are so many new ways to provide service at reduced costs (and costs per additional customer). Things like support forums and 1-click installers were never available in non-tech markets. To not take advantage of these things seems crazy. I am striving for this promised land with our web design company and I think we can make it there!