The Consumer Power


While most companies talk about consumer friendliness, customer centricity, customer relationship etc. more often than not they are mere lip service or jargons with little sincerity behind these grand sounding words.

When a company lacks the sincerity to deal with their customers fairly, some one comes along and puts the company on the dock and though the trial by the customers may be long drawn out it is ultimately the death sentence for the brand or the organizations itself many a times.

There are hundreds of recorded cases of companies going down the tube in spite of the best possible product and high visibility promotions just because they failed to take care of the customers in all sincerity.

Jeremy dorosin and the Starbucks is a case in point where one single customer created a movement and media attention so wide that the company had to close shop.

Starbucks coffee simply refused to acknowledge the genuine grievance of a customer and laughed him off. In spite of their claims of people oriented service, they failed to note a genuine customer complaint. When Jeremy Dorosin went to the media and the internet, millions of affected customer whether of starbucks or other companies joined in to orchestrate their protest against the high handedness of big business? The unfairness was visible when Starbucks painted Jeremy Dorosin as a nut.

The company had to close shop ultimately and we now have the famous term Starbucked out of this customer victory.

Just do a search of the word Jeremy Dorosin in any search engine and you can read all about it.

The point that needs to be raised here is:

Can the customer be used like a whore? Use them and discard them when you feel like. Is he just a number; the more you have the better is your bottom line.

Or is the customer going to be an important component around which your business revolves.

Would you like to shortchange the customer for your short term profits?

Do you react differently to your customer and you as a customer?

Is your entire organization designed to revolve around the customer or only your Sales and Customer Care have to think about them and rest of the organization is trying to beat the customer orientation by an accountant mind set.

These are just the basic questions you need to ask yourself if you want to survive and profit from business. As Peter Drucker said almost 50 years back, Customer is Business.

Decide whether you want run a business or run out of it by forgetting the customer.

R.G. Srinivasan is a Certified Trainer, Writer and Author with more than two decades of managerial experience. He writes a regular blog on management thoughts which you may check out at http://management-thoughts.blogspot.com for interesting articles on management, managerial resources, strategies and experiences.