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On Christmas day I thought I might as well get my router setup so that everything was ready for the 30th, but I was amazed to find that the my ADSL was already active. That’s four days from registration to activation and two of those days were Christmas Eve and Christmas Day! Now anyone who’s gone through the agony of waiting weeks for broadband activation will be as impressed as I was at this achievement.

But why should I be surprised when I receive better than average service? Why is it that I, like so many other consumers expect companies to let us down and just sigh and accept it when it happens time and time again? I think the answer to those questions is a simple one, price erosion.

As I mentioned in my Retail Therapy column a few weeks back, these days price isn’t so much the most important factor for consumers, it’s the ONLY factor. With consumers demanding lower and lower prices, something’s got to give and that something is, all too often good service. Eclipse Internet is by no means the cheapest ISP around, but I have friends and colleagues who have gone with a more canine ISP because of the cheap deals on offer, but ended up tearing their hair out as they waited fruitlessly for connection.

Unfortunately instead of the resulting poor service created by price erosion causing consumers to start seeing the value of good service, it has just made us accept its non-existence. Yes we’ll whinge and moan about not getting the service we think we deserve, but one thing we’re not willing to do is pay for it.

A direct reflection of the consumer’s obsession with price is the ever growing number of sales staff and ever shrinking number of customer service staff – with prices and margin forced down, retailers have to focus on volume of sales. The result is that each individual customer is worth less and customer retention is less important than it was.

Of course there’s still some hope for companies that provide good service as long as their satisfied customers spread the word. Before signing up to Eclipse I checked with my resident printer expert Simon Williams – I noticed that he was an Eclipse customer already. He told me that he was very happy with the service, but more importantly he told me that he signed up because of a personal recommendation from a friend.

When a company isn’t the cheapest, it lives and dies on word of mouth. So, instead of whinging and moaning about the poor service you receive, why not concentrate on spreading the word when the service is good? If we as consumers start to value good service even if it costs us a little more, perhaps we’ll start to expect it rather than be surprised by it.

Links:
Eclipse Internet

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