Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Choose your customers

Do you ever think about choosing your customers?  I think you should.

The other day I was grocery shopping with my two boys who are 5 and 4 years old.  They both had those little kid shopping carts and were helping me shop.  We settled in the juice and cereal aisle and while I am the first to admit my boys can be crazy shoppers, at this time they had their carts nicely lined up along the side of the aisle.  A woman came up along side and parked her cart parallel to us effectively blocking the aisle.  Another woman came along and said to my kids, "You must move," in a very harsh tone.  The woman next to us moved her cart and said to the angry woman in a kind fashion, "It was my fault too."

In my best attempt not to be angry, I said to the upset woman, "Ma'am, you are going to be OK." She continued on in her unhappy fashion, not addressing me or the other woman.  The kind woman who was also blocking the aisle looked back to me and said, "I guess she is having a bad day."  Yes, I guess she was having a bad day and doing her best to get me to have a bad day as well.

The thing is, is that the shopping experience gave the woman no reason to be angry.  The store wasn't busy, there was plenty of parking, it was easy to check out, there was no shortage on any items, and yet she is still angry and making me angry, which in turn is making my shopping experience bad, and giving me a negative impression of the store.  The kind woman had the exact opposite effect, I felt better about the store because of her kindness.  So should the store care about the type of customer it has?  I would argue yes.

I love that Uber rates it customers.  There is no getting around the fact that your customer is part of your brand experience.    

No comments:

Post a Comment