Have you ever thought about the marketing value of knowing the mistakes you have made in the past? I am here to tell you that learning about your mistakes is a gold mine  of marketing wealth. Most of us would like to think that we are providing good services to everyone who takes a chance on using our businesses.  Unfortunately, this is rarely true for absolutely everyone who patronizes our businesses.

If you are competent and have a pleasant disposition, odds are that you are able to meet the needs of the vast majority of your clients. However, none of us are one hundred percent successful and the gold is found in understanding what caused us to lose clients. Somewhere, your marketing and customer service systems failed you and more than likely it will happen again unless you address it.

The real problem here is studies have shown that up to 96 percent of people who experience a bad interaction with your business will never spontaneously complain to you. Why is it a bad thing you don’t have to deal with their complaints?  Because they just leave and never come back!  Despite the fact that they don’t complain to you, they will be more than happy to tell everyone they know to stay away from your business.

Typically for every complaint you hear about, about 25 others are unhappy with you and don’t bother to tell you. Again, they just leave!  If that isn’t enough to motivate you, realize that up to 95  percent of them would have continued to patronize your business if you had resolved the problem quickly.

In today’s economy setting up a system to track client feedback about your business may be the most cost effective marketing task you will ever accomplish. It really isn’t that hard to do. First you need to have a system to track who patronizes your business and how often. Second you must have their contact information. Finally, you must develop a system to actively solicit their feedback about the experience with your business. Of course there are a lot more details to put all this together, but the  overall system is that easy. The vast majority of business never bother to set it up!

The first thing the salesman did is to try and divert us into buying a new Ford version of the type of car we were considering. Rather than accept we had no interest in that car, we had to endure the sales pitch before he would take us to look at the car we came to see.  That  was the first mistake that made it much less likely I would want to buy from him.  He seemed unmotivated to take us to see the car we wanted to see, I suspect because his potential commission was not as much.

However, the thing that really made me certain I would not buy from them was his response to a question I asked. I recently bought a 10 month old Ford F-150 from a  Chrysler dealership where a friend works. I had gotten a great deal on  a very nice truck. However, I had been unable to figure out how to use one particular feature of the navigation/audio system.  Being that the I bought it from a dealership that did not typically sell  Fords, I had been thinking that I would stop by a Ford dealership the first chance I got to ask someone who would probably be able to explain to me what I needed to do,  or tell me if there was a problem.

I mentioned to the salesman I had a question that maybe someone there could answer and briefly explained the problem .  His first response to me was  "Where did you buy the truck?" When I told him that I had gotten it at a Chrysler dealership he showed absolutely no interest in helping me locate someone at his dealership that I could speak with about the problem. He just insisted I needed to go back to that dealership to ask them about the issue. Amazing! It would have taken him maybe a minute to point me in the direction of someone there whom I could ask about the problem since it was a Ford vehicle, but he wasn’t interested in making the effort to do even that. He essentially was taking the "not my problem" approach. He then went on to try and sell a car to my wife. What he did accomplish to was make absolutely certain we will never buy a car from his dealership!  He was an amazingly lazy and short sighted salesman. Remember this story the next time someone asks you about something that might not make an immediate sale for your business.

I was having some interior work done on my house by a home renovation company that is an owner operator small business. This story is a perfect example of the failure of a business owner to take a problem and turn it into way of creating a loyal customer. As you may find on this site, I believe very strongly that problems in business sometimes present one of the best opportunities to create truly loyal customers.

The short version of what happened is that I needed an interior wall reduced in size and this required moving a light switch and the thermostat for my air conditioner. The contractor quoted me an amount for the job, which I thought was reasonable, and said the work could be done in one day. At the start of the job I showed him where the breaker was that controlled the light switch, but specifically stated that it didn’t turn off the power to the thermostat. He said no problem they would deal with that.

The thermostat was controlled by another breaker that they failed to disconnect. When they moved the thermostat it apparently resulted in a wire being shorted out and damage to a part of the system. The first day they could not figure out the problem and I was left without air conditioning that night and the job only half done. They were obviously frustrated, and so was my family, but no hard feelings and a promise to get it done first thing the next day.

The next day they didn’t arrive until after noon and began trying to figure out the problem. They decided to call an air conditioner technician and he determined the electrical problem due to failure to flip the breaker for the system when disconnecting and moving the thermostat. At this point the owner admitted it was his fault, and continued working on the job without directly asking for me to pay any of the extra expense of air conditioning technician .

When it was almost done we had a conversation about the problem and he stated that, although he admitted it was his fault, I had led him to believe the thermostat was disconnected when I turned off the breaker for the lights. I reminded him that I specifically said it was not turned off by that breaker and he had told me not to worry about that. He was evasive and did not admit that is what happened though not directly denying it.

OK, so now I have gone from being impressed with someone fixing their mistakes to being irritated that he attempted to pass part of the blame back to me for what ever reason. When time came to pay the bill I asked my wife to handle it because I was still a little irritated and busy feeding my kids. He then did the next thing that was a major mistake in my mind. My wife then said she was going to pay him the amount agreed upon, and he pulled the old trick of pretending he didn’t recall that amount and asked her if he had quoted a price higher. He indicated strongly that he thought he should be paid the higher price ($50 more) than he had quoted because of the extra expense and time of solving the electrical problem. Not a huge amount of money, but that isn’t the point. I just watched as she paid it.

So here is the central issue here. This business owner had the opportunity to turn his screw up into a situation in which I would have been very impressed with his integrity and become a loyal long time repeat customer. Sure, the job turned out to be more than he had thought, but it was clearly his mistake that caused the problem. I thought he was going to do it right, but at the last minute he attempted to pass off part of the blame to the customer and ask for more money to help cover his expenses. Very short sighted decision. I would have been considerably less irritated if he just asked out right for more money than they way he chose to handle it.

As it stands now I am satisfied with the end quality of the work he did, but have no enthusiasm for recommending him to anyone else. Will I use him again one day? Not sure about that. If I have another convenient option I certainly won’t feel any sense of loyalty to patronize his business.