Here is our birdfeeder, with no birds, not even the pesky squirrel who does contortions to break into the feeder. You see we bought a new bag of the PETCO Black Oil Sunflower Seed and the animals disappeared. No fighting over the perch, no annoying squirrel hogging the feeder.
Alarmed, my husband cleaned the feeder and thoroughly checked the yard for any weird growing berries or other vegetation that could be deterring the animals. But nothing. Pretty sure that the birdseed was contaminated he emailed PETCO Customer Relations, and they wrote back:
Unfortunately, there has been no information provided to us regarding any issue with the PETCO Black Oil Sunflower Seed. You may want to check if there’s something different with the bag that you recently purchased compared to those you have purchased before…You may also want to contact the manufacturer, Kaytee, regarding your inquiry.
Why would PETCO refer us to the manufacturer when it was a PETCO branded product? Why wouldn’t they ask for more details about our purchase so they could track possible contaminated shipments in our geographic area? Why wouldn’t PETCO apologize and tell us to return it to the retailer for another product? If they looked at my husband’s purchasing history — he has one of those PETCO PALS loyalty cards — they’d see just how steady and profitable a customer he has been over the past 10 years.
The lack of PETCO interest so turned off my husband that he switched to a competitor, PetSmart, and tells all of his animal-loving friends about this story. Talk about word of mouth marketing.
The marketing lesson is this: customer service is more important and valuable than any advertising. It creates positive or in this case, negative, word of mouth. Yet for many companies customer service is not part of marketing.
Advertising, promotion and CRM loyalty programs report to marketing, but not customer service? In today’s social media world where the good and bad travel fast, that’s just for the birds.
Our bird friends are returning after a month away from the feeder. But no squirrel. We think he may have died from the tainted birdseed.
So is there a way that word of mouth can effect irresponsible merchants when they aren’t competing for your business?
Our gas company–Laclede Gas of St. Louis–ignored our request to cancel service at our old apartment and over-billed as a result. After paying more than the portion we owed and spending more than four hours on the phone and writing letters explaining our case they just sent us a very rude final collection notice for the remainder of the illicit bill. Since I don’t have time to fight them, I have to just pay it.
I’d like to change to a competitor but the only way to do that would be to change out all our appliances for electric; highly impractical and I know from other people’s experiences that the electric company is no better.
It seems that on some level, though, negative public sentiment towards irresponsible utility monopolies must have an effect on the company–but does it?
Currie,
If the public sentiment is made public and loud, even utility monopolies can change. The trick is creating a groundswell of angry sentiment among many consumers and influencers — and becoming a thorn in the side of the utility. Many consumers have formed blogs/sites “I hate (name of org.)” or “org. sucks,” and they use Twitter to stir things up. Of course, this takes work, so people usually just pay the over-charge and fume. I do believe, however, that the power of social networks can change even the big monopolies.