I was pretty frustrated today when the boss of a small water purification company came to replace my Reverse Osmosis (RO) water filtration membranes. I was asked to sign a new contract worth about US$150 for 2 more new six-monthly servicing jobs. I bought the water purification system some 5 years ago and the hardware is still in working condition. My wife and I are not satisfied with the customer service, and some of the things are:
- He did not keep a proper record of the servicing contract. On occasions, we had to point out to him that we were not due to sign a new contract because there were a couple of outstanding jobs. He apologized by explaining that because of high staff turnover, his records were not properly kept. He explained that there were times when we deferred the service appointments the staff recorded them as job done, i.e. there were double recordings for a single job.
- Poor service quality. Because of high staff turnover, there were times rework had to be carried out due to minor faults like pressure leak and use of wrong parts etc….
- Never kept to appointment time.
This case is a good example of locking a customer in to earn the back-end servicing fees. We had to wait for the hardware to wear out and change the supplier. This is what I have explained earlier about “hard-locking” a customer in. I reproduce part of it below. For a fuller explanation, please read: Business Strategy: Generating income from the front or back end?