I haven’t posted about business strategy in a while, but based on a recent experience with a moving company, I thought I would pass on a new methodology I gleaned from the process.

If you are interested in losing customers, take the following steps:

1. Agree to an appointment at your potential customer’s residence at a certain time on a certain date;
2. Don’t bother to call and confirm the time and date with the potential customer as the appointment approaches;
3. Don’t bother arriving on time;
4. Provide a quote in writing, but do so by sending an email that is an embedded image (why bother with a text image or an attached PDF?) that not only might not be readable by your potential customer’s email program, but that also prints out terribly;
5. Make the estimate somewhat vague, but provide a seemingly good estimate for the job;
6. When the potential customer phones to book your services, make sure to throw in a sizable “administrative fee” ($500+ works well) to process the transaction;
7. Remember to NOT include the “administrative fee” in the original estimate;
8. When the potential customer asks why the added fee was not part of the estimate, blame it on your fairly new employee that performed the estimate;
9. Do NOT make any attempt to waive the fee, explain it further, re-draft the estimate, or take any other further action;
10. Be sure to leave your potential customer wondering whether the “administrative fee” will be the first or last added charge that did not appear in the estimate; and,
11. Make sure to repeat the process with each new potential customer.

TAGS: Business Ethics | Business Strategy | Integrity | Ethics | Moving | Customer Service

This entry was posted on Friday, June 2nd, 2006 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Business Ethics, Business Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.