How Does Your Customer Service Rate???

I've got to tell you about a situation that recently happened to me..

Last week, I ordered some flowers for my wife for Valentine's day. I went through a huge online floral shop (not 1-800Flowers.com - they're who I'm using from here on) and asked them to get delivered specifically on Valentine's day.

Mind you - this order wasn't just a couple of plain roses. It was a combination of the first flower I proposed to her with and several of her favorite flowers.

So, after I placed my order, they assured me that the order would be delivered on Feb 14th.

No problem.

The next day I talk to my wife, and to my surprise, she doesn't tell me 'thank you' for the flowers.

Well, I found out - THEY DIDN'T SHOW UP!!

I'd paid for delivery on a specific day and they didn't follow up.

No bueno.

1st mistake.

Next, I email the company and ask why they didn't deliver on time. The response I get is that the driver couldn't find my wife's place of business, so they just gave up and went home.

??????????

2nd mistake.

Ok, so I verify that delivery will be made the next day. They agree.

The next day as I'm talking to my wife, she tells me she called the company (I spoiled the surprise by telling her to expect flowers), and she tells me the company asks if she still wanted the flowers!!

At this point, I vow to never do business with them. But it gets worse...

My wife sends me a message and tells me that the flowers DID arrive, but they're wilted.

So, you're telling me I paid good money to have some wilted, unattractive flowers delivered to my wife a day late??

3rd strike. You're OUT - completely.

Now, there are a lot of marketing lessons you can learn from this. The most important being maximizing total customer value.

Think about this - as a military member, being deployed make you miss home and makes you want to let your loved ones at home know you're thinking about them. An easy way is to send flowers, gifts, cards, etc., back home to them.

Now, the company knows I'm deployed. And I'm sure they fail to realize that military members rarely deploy by themselves. Now, if I tell a couple of my buddies here that I sent my wife flowers and they want to follow suit, doesn't that mean they'll more than likely take my recommendation on who to use for this service?

Let's put some numbers with this:

If I spend $100 to send flowers home, and I do this every month, that's $1,200 a year that this company will get from me. Not only that, but if I like their service, the average lifetime of a customer is about 3 to 5 years.

So on the low end, they would have added an additional $3,600 to their bottom line without any advertising expense.

Now, if I told two of my buddies and they followed suit, that's another $1,200 a year, $3,600 total for three years.

In all, the company would have earned an extra $10,800 by doing nothing but fulfilling their end of the deal.

And now, it's all gone because do you really think I'm going to recommend them to anyone? In fact, I've already told my buddies NOT to do business with this place. And after hearing my story, they've probably told a lot of their friends the same.

Now think about it if it were YOUR business. Are you letting a potential $10,800 in profits walk out of your door by failing to meet customer expectations?

Don't you DARE shrug this off as being un-important. Learning to maximize TCV (total customer value) is an important factor all businesses need to learn to master.

Tomorrow, I'll show you several ways they could have fixed it and kept me as a customer - and how you can do the same in case it happens to you.