Do You Want It Cheap or Good?: A Lesson in Customer Experience

Ever heard the adage:

“You can have it cheap, fast, or right. Pick two.”?

And that seems to be true of most businesses. If you’re a business owner or decision maker, you’ve probably experienced the fact that for most businesses it comes down to a matter of competing on price or a piece of the customer experience. With the Internet and the global economy, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to compete on price. There’s always someone out there who is willing to take a loss in order to make it big down the line.

Discounting prices and offering the cheapest of anything is a very difficult place to be in. It’s like standing on an icy slide. You have no footing. Someone can always offer a deeper discount and because you haven’t spent the time cultivating the customer experience or relationship, your customers leave as soon as they find a better price.

Shep Hyken is a customer service expert. In a recent article on Medium he told a great service story, “One very, very cold day…a woman got out of the car to pump gas, an elderly woman. I went out and pumped her gas for her. My manager got upset with me for pumping this lady’s gas. He says, ‘we’re a self-serve station’ and I thought, well you know, ‘but she could have died, slipped on a piece of ice, I mean she looked frail’. So I helped her and he says, ‘What is she going to do the next time? She’s going expect the same thing.’ And I said, ‘well that’s fine because there’s three other stations, one on each of the corners [of] the intersection, and I think that I’d love her to come back and always do business with us.”

And I bet she did.

Because that station was offering her something the others weren’t. It was probably worth the extra $.20 on the fill-up for her to remain safe and warm in the comfort of her car. And best of all that loyalty-building service cost that gas station nothing other than an employee’s time and putting up with cold temps for less than ten minutes.

What can you do to make a difference in the lives of your customers or in the customer experience?

This is something I challenge myself and the TQ team with every day. Won’t you join us?