If you’ve been reading my blogs for a while, you’ll know that recently I bought a new (to me) car. I detailed the process I went through (read the blog here) and the lessons that all business owners could take from my experiences. Well, this blog is an update and will reveal some new lessons that business owners can take and use straight away in their businesses from my experiences.
The other week I lent my car to my wife and was somewhat disturbed to receive a phone call a little while later complaining that my car had overheated and that she’d had to pull over. Now I’m not a petrol head, and view vehicles as a tool to get me from A to B, which is why when I bought the vehicle I decided to take out an extended warranty covering all the mechanical parts from bumper to bumper. This gave me some comfort when I called the people I’d bought the car from. I thought that this is not a big issue I’m covered, it’ll be just a little minor inconvenience.
Of course, I was wrong, the first thing I noticed that I didn’t get a call back for two days and when eventually I did get in contact with someone from the people I’d bought the car from I was given the brush off with ‘contact the warranty company’ they need to sort this out for you. Now, this is moving on my mind from a ‘minor inconvenience’ to a ‘major inconvenience’ with perhaps some financial impact.
I did eventually get my car sorted with help from a family member who works in the motor trade (he’s a mechanic). However, this is not the point. How do I now feel about the people who I bought my car from? Well, you can probably guess that I’m somewhat disappointed, in my hour of need they brushed me off. They let me down badly. My hour of need can be described as a ‘moment of truth (MOT) for this business.
Jan Carlzon in his book ‘Moments of Truth’ defined these as ‘the customer interaction that sets the tone of the entire company in the mind of the customer’. Moments of Truth come at any time in customer interactions, they can come during the sales process in which case they result in either a sale or loss of sale depending on the outcome. Or in my case, they can come many months or even years after the sale, and of course, if the business fails to respond correctly to the ‘moment of truth’ then the relationship is spoiled, perhaps forever.
If you were in my shoes would you now recommend this company to your friends, would you when buying your next car look at this company, I doubt it and neither will I. It gets worse because I will tell people about my experience with them, “they were great with the sale but didn’t want to know me when I had a problem”. So they’ve lost a customer, they’ve lost future referrals and they’ve got bad news circulating about them all because they failed at the moment of truth. The sales they have lost through this interaction would have been worth thousands to them.
The sad thing is that I won’t be the only person affected in such a way by this company I’m pretty sure that many others will be.
So you’re asking what should they have done:-
Well, the first thing they should have done is respond to me in a prompt manner. They could have simply said, “Mr. Olivant take your car to our local depot and we’ll get somebody to look at it straight away”. This wouldn’t have cost them anything and they would have got the warranty work as a bonus, and I would have been happy that I was being looked after (I’m not blaming them for the original fault, these things happen after all).
The second thing they should have done is to have built a relationship with me. Over the last 7 months since I’ve had the vehicle I’ve heard nothing from them. Oh, I’ve had the odd email about new offers and trying to sell me a new car (BTW I’ve just bought one so really don’t need another one right now, is my response to those). No, they’ve done nothing to try and build a relationship with me, no invites to customer only special events etc, nothing at all.
If you think that building a relationship with people after you’ve sold them something doesn’t work, then check out Joe Girard. Joe sold over 13000 cars in 15 years by building relationships with his customers, who then came back time after time and referred their friends and family to Joe because they knew that Joe would give them great service and price. Joe became the greatest salesman in the world through this simple strategy.
‘Moment’s of Truth’ happen in all businesses that deal with any kind of customer, all of the time. It’s your job as the business owner to make sure that when a ‘moment of truth’ arrives your customer has a positive experience.
Here’s the irony, businesses will spend thousands generating leads that make the phone ring or get people to visit their business, but they won’t spend a penny on ‘after-sales care’ to ensure that they keep the customer that they’ve invested heavily in buying in the first place. Go figure.
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