"Good to excellent service must be delivered again and again. As soon as a customer has a bad customer service experience, the seeds of doubt are planted. The probability of the next sale decreases, erasing gains made from previous positive experiences."
- Carlos Mora
This is so, so true. You are only as good as the last experience. You may have been heroes for years, but any deviation is seen as a new and negative trend, not an aberration.
And it might not even have been your organization that let someone down. It might have been another company in your category, but the customer thinks you are all the same.
The fundamental difference between a service experience and a product experience is the tremendous difficulty of delivering consistency. Don't let anybody tell you it's easy -- it's not. But you have to keep at it. The gardens of customer experience take a long time to cultivate, but they are always fragile.
Here's article link: "Customer Service as Marketing through Statistical Modeling" by Carlos Mora, DM Direct Nov 14, 2006. Thanks to Emma Warrilow.
