I got a battery yesterday. It is an Optima Yellow Top. For people that are outside of the off-road or racing world... big whoop, right?
But there is a little backstory here.
I won the battery at an event called Mud4Blood. It is a blood drive in the Atlanta area off-road community. LifeSouth does the collection, and it is one of their largest one day collections each year. Part of the event is a raffle... and I won the battery. These aren't from the discount rack at the auto parts store up the street... these are almost $200... and they are vibration resitant and can't spill. (blah, blah, cool stuff, blah)...
Actually... I got a certificate for the battery... and promptly misplaced it in my office. It was good for 6 months... and the six months expired a week before I found the certificate. I mailed it off... I wrote a little note explaining what had happened... A couple of weeks later, I got a battery... yesterday.
They could have VERY easily denied the FREE battery... the certicate had expired...
This morning, I was wandering through my reading list and I hit upon a blog by Seth Godin. Embracing Lifetime Value. In the post, he talks about how companies toss away customers that deliver thousands of dollars in profit over their lifetime for just pennies.
To get a new customer, many companies will spend hundreds of dollars in marketing. That customer might be worth thousands of dollars in profit. And yet, instead of spending $20 to retain the customer... they clam up and send him elsewhere...
How many times have you dealt with the cell phone company, the cable company or the local auto dealer and had them lock down over nothing? I dropped a satellite provider. We were having a hard time with equipment and had been trying to get it upgraded to what they were giving new customers. It wasn't until we had signed up with a new company that they offered to do just what we had asked for to begin with... That was five years ago. How much have they lost in that five years?
Isn't it easier just to make people happy?
How can we apply this to real estate? What can WE do to make our customers want to stay with us? Optima sent me a battery... I didn't buy it, it was free... I won it. But they had an out and didn't HAVE to honor the certificate. Instead of a happy customer, they got a fan. How much might I be worth to them in the future?
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