I had recently bought a camping tent and I went a little overboard with the price, quality and size of the product. After a month of research, reading customer reviews and saving money, I finally narrowed down my search to one tent. After further review of my finances I decided to make a mad dash; before I changed my mind, for the nearest sporting goods store that carried the tent. I was promptly greeted at the entrance and there my adventure started.
After about 3 minutes inside the store I heard an announcement stating the store would be closing in 15 minutes. I frantically looked for a store representative to help me with my purchase and after approximately 8 minutes I located one. Upset at this point that I had to frantically find a sales representative and rush to purchase a $450 tent, I sat in the camping area debating whether or not to purchase the item from this store, because of the lack of service.
After asking the long lost sales representative why the store was closing 3 hours early and informing him that I was upset with the situation. He informed me it was due to inventory and that the store manager had posted notices on the front doors of the store. I objected to that last portion of his statement and quickly walked with him to the front of the store to show me these notices.
There we were both greeted by the lack of notice that the store would be closing early due to inventory. Ashamed of the incident the manager quickly gave me a 15% discount on all the items that I had and asked the cashier to send him a copy of the receipt.
This situation left me to question the practice of customer service with customer analytics. If you have a loyal CORE customer who is willing to buy from you on a regular basis, you should be willing to do anything to keep that customer. My experience from one department manager, who was willing to do this for me and other customers, showed me that customer service goes hand-in-hand with customer analytics.
The use of customer analytics can help you know who your customer is, how much they are worth to you, where they are and how to market to them, but it can not help with customer service.
