National Clothesline

As I stated last month, customers can be divided into three groups based on their levels of satisfaction.

The first group are the Advocates. These are your most satisfied customers — the ones who are completely committed to you and wouldn’t leave you under any circumstances. Advocates are not born, they are created. To create and Advocate, you must go beyond what is normally expected of a drycleaner and give them a level of service and quality that will make their dealing with you a truly memorable experience.

Advocates are fiercely loyal to a business. They will refuse to switch, no matter how aggressively your competitors may promote their own businesses. They will even drive by competitors to do business with you and no one else.

They prefer your services over the competition’s and will usually pay a premium for the privilege of doing business with you.

Advocates tell everyone who will listen, and even some who won’t, about their experiences with your store. They are, in fact, your best salespeople.

Several years ago, a lady can into a drycleaner, on the verge of tears, complaining that the dress she was holding, still in its white heirloom box, was now yellowed. She said the dress had been cleaned by this same cleaner many years before, soon after her wedding day.

Now her daughter was planning her own wedding and wanted to wear her mother’s dress. The manager, who had only been on the job for about eight years, empathized with the customer and took the dress back for recleaning.

Soon afterwards, the owner returned from making his daily deposit at the bank and was shown the wedding dress in the white box.

His immediate reaction was, “This isn’t our problem. In 30 years of operation, we never used white heirloom boxes. To this day, we only use the gold ‘keystone’ boxes. Obviously we didn’t clean this dress, originally, and the customer should take it back to the cleaner who did.”

He thought to himself that, in all probability, the original cleaner is out of business, due to shoddy work.

But then he had another thought. He wondered how pleased would this customer be if he soaked the dress in sodium perborate and gave it back to her looking like new? And that’s exactly what he did. When the customer returned for the dress, she was ecstatic. She couldn’t thank them enough for turning her nightmare into a dream come true. Advocates are not born. They are created.

The second group are the merely satisfied Apathetics. They are relatively happy with their experience but are not emotionally attached to your company. To these customers, a drycleaner is a drycleaner, and it doesn’t really matter much where they take their clothes. Apathetics are not born, they are created.

Customers become Apathetics when you only meet their basic expectations. Customers expect you to have their clothes well cleaned, well pressed, and ready on the time and date that it was promised. They expect this as much as you expect to be paid for your work. And you each have a right to these expectations. This is why satisfaction is sometimes defined as the absence of problems.

Though they tend to remain loyal, merely satisfied Apathetics will not endure any inconveniences, or make a special effort to use your services. Nor are they willing to pay premium prices for what, for them, is a commodity service.

Apathetics are susceptible to competitors’ advances (advertising offers). And it usually doesn’t take much to make them switch!

Apathetics keep their mouths shut and seldom speak about their customer experiences, either good or bad. Apathetics are not born. They are created.

The third group are people who have experienced recent problems with your services and are basically fed up with everything about you. These are people who will search out a competitor to fill their needs. Assassins are not born, they are created.

You create an Assassin when you fail to live up to the basic expectations discussed above. Or fail to rectify a problem soon after it has occurred.

Assassins will pay more and, if necessary, drive past your store to do so.

They are vocal and will go out of they way to poison your business, by trying to convince others not to do business with you.

Assassins are 50 percent more likely to tell someone about a bad experience than an Advocate is to tell someone about a great experience.

About six years ago, I was watching the local news and a lady’s plight with here wedding dress was being featured in a “We’re On Your Side” segment. It seems a newlywed had recently brought her wedding dress in to be cleaned and heirloomed.

When she came to pick up her dress, she could tell just from the bodice that it was the wrong dress. She attempted to convince the drycleaner that the dress he was giving her was not hers. He insisted that was her dress and refused to entertain the problem any further.

Now this lady was back in his store, with a news crew and a photograph of her in her original wedding dress. It was obvious, to everyone that the dress in the box was not the same one she was wearing on her wedding day.

The newscaster approached the counter with the cameras and the irate bride close behind. The news lady asked the counterperson if she could speak to the store owner. Speaking unsurely, the counterperson said that the owner was not in.

Just then, the cameras panned over the counter and crouched below was the drycleaner, himself, looking straight into the camera. Assassins are not born. They are created.

It’s easy to see that the more Advocates we create and the fewer Assassins and Apathetics we create, the more our businesses will grow.

While it easy to classify customers into large groups, the most important thing to remember is: Advocates, Assassins and Apathetics are created one customer at a time.