Are You Serious?! (The quickest way to alienate your customers)
January 17, 2009
Your customers are very important people. They pay you (yes you had better be charging them!). They give you feedback. They tell their friends about your product.
In short, they are people you need to take care of.
In my opinion, one of the quickest ways to alienate your customers is to disappoint them as a company. Moral, ethical or plain common sense lapses at a company will spur more outlash than a crappy product.
I couldn’t believe it when I read this article on TechCrunch (referencing this blog post) about a Belkin employee (whom I used to work with when I was in college, very odd) possibly paying $0.65 for positive product reviews (via Amazon’s MechanicalTurk) on websites like Amazon, NewEgg and Buy.com.
Sure everyone wants good reviews for their products. But if you’re products aren’t that great, trying to fake it ’til you make it is sure to catch up with you in the end, and tick a lot of people off as it is in this case with Belkin.
Customer service is important for any business, but holding your company to a high moral and ethical standard should be your top priority. There is no faster way to lose people’s faith in your business/brand than to let that slip.
