Excuse my rant while I let it out. Admitting there is a problem with your product is always a good thing to do as long as you fix the problem- all of the problem- on your nickel. Paying for your mistakes with your customers’ wallets is retention marketing suicide. And when you are selling a brand specific product (like an automobile), you are simply conceding your future sales to your competition. Do you truly believe any of the people who purchased this particular GM vehicle will be clamoring to purchase another one after getting stiffed for half the bill?

There is something that is askew when it comes to customer service in the days in which we live. Many would separate marketing and customer service as if they had nothing to do one with the other. I believe they are intrinsically linked and cannot be separated. No business likes it when their product breaks down. It is costly. It is a drain on the bottom line and we are all scrounging to protect our margins in a down economy. However, customer service has to take a much longer view of the customer than what is happening at this very moment. This is where retention marketing comes into play. Unless you do not care about selling to your clients more than once (like selling fireworks out of the trunk of your car on the Fourth of July), it is much harder to get a new client than it is to retain the ones you already have. After the sale is made, taking care of your customers is the gauge they will use to determine whether they give you their business once again. Despite efforts to make our economy run on a European model, free market economics is still at work in the United States. And one of the rules of free markets is that the consumer decides where dollars will be spent, what businesses they frequent, which products are to be bought and which products are to be spurned. This is why good customer service has to engage your clients in the marketing of the business for future sales.

Let me give you another example. You would think there would be no more than one opportunity to sell a funeral. After all, the customer is dead. However, a good funeral director will do his best to comfort the family of the deceased, give them options within their budget and work with them on payment. Many will take their payment directly from a life insurance policy distribution rather than billing the family. Funerals are very costly. It is a $10 billion a year industry and it is recession proof (people are always dying.) But mortuaries, by and large, are still small businesses that depend upon customer service to market their good name. Let the word get out that you stiffed a little old widow and you will be out of business quickly. Most funeral homes know that if they treat a family well, take care of all the requests that can come from a family in a highly charged emotional time, they are very likely to earn business from the same family on down the road. And let’s face it, with the Baby Boom generation getting old and dying, there are some real challenges in the funeral business. I have heard of people wanting to buried in their car, having their ashes put into a cannon and fired at sundown, etc.

The point I am making is meeting the expectations of your current clients simply pays dividends on down the road. If GM had stepped up to pay all of the costs of fixing my instrument panel, there is a good chance I would purchase another GM vehicle, as I have for the past 30 years. As it stands right now, they've lost my business for the next 30 years.