The bigger truth is found in small thingsPt 1

Have you ever made a judgment about a major organistion based on a single interaction ? Thought so, and I bet it wasn't positive.

The truth is we make meta judgments based on micro experiences.

How do I judge an entire hotel chain?

On what my experience was the last time I registered, when the girl on the desk asked me if I'd ever stayed with the chain before when I'd only checked out 36 hours earlier.

You ring the service desk, get an off hand message and conclude IT don't care about the business.

Get the small things right in IT and there is a chance you will get the big things right.

Get the small things wrong and you might as well go home.

Flowers

Yesterday was Mothers Day (In the UK, don't panic if you are in the US). I ordered my mother some flowers from Interflora. As usual they were priced at a premium because it is a special day and a Sunday as well. No flowers are delivered, and my mother is obviously upset.

So I complain to Interflora and they respond with an automatic refund by email. But that is it. No promise to investigate why the flowers weren't delivered, no assurance it won't happen again, no recognition that they let me down over an important event, and no recognition of the upset caused to my mother. In fact the feeling you get is this happens a lot and they just want to get rid of complaints ASAP without quibbling.

Now I guess there is nothing wrong with that, you could even say they have done more than they had to, but somehow it isn't going to make me order flowers from them again.

I wonder how often we treat customers like that in the IT world?

I would like to think we wouldn't, but I suspect we do. We apologise, take the hit on service credits and expect the customer to forget it ever happened, rather than realising that in the customer's eyes getting service credits is a sub optimal outcome compared to being convinced the contracted service will be delivered in future.