Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Serendipity - and the Problem of Pushy Customers
My wife and I watched a favorite romantic comedy of ours last night, "Serendipity." The movie is about a man and a woman who meet, find themselves very much mutually attracted, but go their own ways because each is involved in another relationship at the moment.

Before parting, though, they each provide a random way by which the other could conceivably find the them again, just to test whether they are "fated" to be together.

Seven years later, both of them are within a week of marrying someone else. As they approach their weddings, though, each thinks back to that brief, magical encounter from years before. Both become obsessed with finding the other for the purpose of putting their long-held dream of this perfect encounter to rest before they commit the rest of their lives to their current fiances.

In the course of their search, the frantic man meets a store clerk whose hilarious eccentricities both confound the man, and delight those watching the movie. Among the clerk's eccentricities is an obsession with making sure that customers don't encroach on his personal fiefdom behind the counter.

And as I laughed at his antics as he protected his personal territory, it occurred to me how much the Internet has changed the dynamics between business and customer.

In the past, businesses had the luxury of a self-protective cocoon where they controlled everything in their customer interaction. The customer entered the store where the business controlled what he or she was allowed to see and know of the product. The store could enforce its personal territory.

The Internet, however, makes it increasingly possible for customers successfully to poke their noses behind the counter. Negative customer opinions from halfway around the world now are accessible right from our phones as we walk through the store.

Increasingly, people rely not on what the salesperson says about the product as the final word on it, but seek the opinions of the network of friends they have developed over the Web.

Companies can't get away as much with covering isolated problems in the assurance that those problems would stay localized and buried. Companies find that burying problems as a solution needs to be replaced with openly facing customer problems with complete transparency and eagerness to make things right.

It's a good step toward the true service mindset that is necessary for business. The Internet ensures that we will be judged not on how well we can hide our errors, but on how well we can correct them.
Jeff

Labels: customer service