An Unhappy Grumpy Customer Equals A Lost Sale

Hey, I just had one of those grumpy episodes. Did you ever have one of those?

Let me explain to you my story this morning. Hi I’m Rob Anspach, I’ve been teaching social media since 2008 and customer service to entrepreneurs for probably the last 20 years. And today was one of those days where it started out I was very pleasant and very happy. Then I turned into a grumpy pain in the ass. You see one of the travel membership clubs that I belong to unbeknownst to me added my children to my membership as part of their marketing departments brilliant idea to grant them a six month free membership. Well that membership (those 6 months) expired and they wanted me to continue that at a fee almost triple what I was paying.

So, these people would call me on the phone, “hey we want to renew your membership and we see you have all these extra people on.” My response: “What are you talking about? No! They’re not even supposed to be on there. They don’t even live in this house“.

But nobody seemed to believe me. So I actually went into the travel club where the man behind the counter joked to me about “oh, you must have had one of those senior moments and forgot about it and added your children“. I said, “why would I add my children to this account that don’t even live in my house?” Well, he couldn’t fathom the whole process and then he wanted to charge me more and I got fed up with him and walked out.

So I was a bit irate and grumpy.

I decided in a last ditch effort when I came home I would pick up the phone and call…at least get some satisfaction that if I didn’t get my answer I could slam the phone down then have the rest of the day and sulk.

But the person who came on the phone understood my dilemma and explained to me that it was not my fault. That I did not add these people. That is was a marketing department problem that went awry and they never told many people in their organization what they did. So now you have all these people that became victims of a marketing plan that cost them money. Oh, yeah I’d be grumpy too.

They made it right.

Not only did they take those names off my account finally, they reduced my price which was great. But it was still a pain in the ass hassle that I had to go through to get to this point.

My point is… why make your customers grumpy? They don’t need to be.

“Sometimes the processes that you have, that you think are brilliant ideas when it comes to marketing your products and services all they do is get your customers grumpy. And a grumpy customer can absolutely destroy your business.”

So, if you’re going that route of making your customers grumpy you’d better have a way to make them happy again. Otherwise you will lose out on customers and you’ll have no idea why you upset them.

Anyway this is Rob Anspach hope you found this helpful and I look forward to hearing from you.

Comment below if you were a customer of a business that made you grumpy because of whatever tactics they were doing.