I’ve had The Wall Street Journal delivered to my house for years, without a glitch, until a few weeks ago, when delivery abruptly stopped. I called. I emailed. I made certain the subscription hadn’t expired. As ridiculous as it sounds, I even fired them off a map. In the end it took a boggling 17 days until the paper once again showed up in my driveway.
Everybody I spoke with was concerned, seemed efficient, and followed up with me. So what went wrong? Everybody communicated, but nobody owned the problem.
It turned out that the WSJ contracted delivery out to a subcontractor, with a regional person, a local person and a carrier route delivery person. There was a simple glitch in moving me from one route to another. But for a long time everybody spoke to “their” person, or made one check on the computer and felt they were done.
Sometimes communicating doesn’t mean being politically correct and simply passing information to the next level – it requires picking up the phone or showing up and looking someone in the eye and working things out. If it shakes things up, good. If you leave the management of problem-solving communication to customers, it’s easy for them to become somebody else’s customers.
» Communication Is Key from CustomersAreAlways
Communication is important in the business world and even more important when you are dealing with customers. When there's miscommunication within a company regarding a customer issue, it can detrimental to the relationship with that customer.&nb... [Read More]
Tracked on: February 23, 2006 10:48 PM | Permalink to Trackback