You're Right!

What does this mean and why do so many companies get this wrong?

Seth Godin, who has been BY FAR my favorite blog to read from our suggested reading list at the beginning of the semester, recently posted an experience he had of parking his car in an expensive New York parking lot only to return 45 minutes later to find that his car had been left running! He was then asked to pay as he was leaving. The experience bothered him enough that he wrote to the company to let them know what an unpleasant experience he had. In return, he received a letter from the manager that was totally pointless. The manager told him that he was at fault for not showing the parking attendant how to turn off his car. The point is, why bother to send a letter back at all if only to further insult the customer.

In his book, Setting the Table, Danny Meyer also writes about this as the manager of several five star restaurants. If ever someone in his restaurant is unhappy with a meal, even if they've eaten most of it, he will take it back and bring out something else. He has felt this way since he started running restaurants in the 1980's even when he and his floor managers disagreed on this, he would insist that the money lost on one meal was not worth the loss of a customer over a sour experience.

When thinking about this in online communities I have wondered how to best translate this principle. Groups like facebook have tended to operate with the mindset, "we know what's best, and you're going to like it" and in some ways, no one likes change, and you do have to just do it in order to progress. 

I think one of the emerging ways that we will continue to see push back between corporation and individual is in the use of privacy. All social networks want to promise privacy, because it is very appealing to their audience, yet in practice it is hard to keep those strict privacy expectations when offered additional revenue for sharing profiles, or even when selling the organization to another company. And when will the line between privacy and network become unbearable for consumers enough to actually keep them away? I know of only ONE friend who has dropped her facebook membership because she felt people could find too much information about her online. Any more I'm not sure issues of privacy ever become compelling enough to drive a customer away?