How to drive customers away

Did you know that shoddy computer systems can actually drive customers away? Here’s an excellent example on consumerist.com, which illustrates how one company’s inept systems harmed business. In this case, it not only drove customers away, it drove those customers to warn other potential customers about them.

I found one point particularly interesting about the whole ordeal. The customer states that whenever they went into the store, they had to wait 20 minutes while an employee checked the warehouse stock levels. Today, that should be automatic. In fact, 1 minute is too long for something as simple as checking stock levels.

This story reminded me of one our customers in a similar situation. They had an overstock warehouse, but didn’t have any way to check stock levels automatically. In fact, their salespeople often spent a quarter of their days checking stock levels instead of selling. They fixed the problem, freed their salespeople, and opened a new revenue stream in the process.

Read the whole story here.