When companies lose customers, or worse, cause customers to be lost, this is not a good thing.  After all, companies are supposed to find and attract customers, not lose them.  But if customers are wrongly targeted, they are lost.  If customers are turned off, insulted, frustrated and the like, they are connected with in a very negative and long-lasting way.  Furthermore, they become more likely to tell others about their bad experience.  This happens way too often, usually because companies say one thing, but do another, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes on purporse.  This leads to confusion and delay, at best, or derailing of the sale, negative referral and negative word of mouth, at worst.

Are you frustrating your customers?  Go to a site that complains about a vender and you hear problems again and again.  Why?

You may have been a customer at one of these companies.  Before the sale everything is great – discounts, entertainment, easy to get through to a person, fast answers, etc. but then you buy and become... dirt.  You know what it's like – contacting a company with a question or problem, often of their own making, involves secret codes, passwords, companies that try to make it as efficient as possible, for them.  Discounts are gone, in fact they try to lull you into price increases and less value. But the worst part, according to our research, is how you feel when the answers you get, or the tools they provide don't work.  Go to the web site for your answers and you it doesn't work so you call and get put into a 30 minute line with someone, finally, who doesn't know the answer, and may be less knowledgeable than you are.  They tell you to do something that doesn't work and if you get upset, they hang up.  At each step you have to expend more and more effort while getting further and further from solving the problem you called about.  You get really upset and frustrated, vowing to never buy anything from them and warning everyone you know to stay away from them.

Good thing this never happens at your company, right?

If it does, or may, talk to Techtel about Feedback on Customer Experience and its effects on Reputation.