As you may have surmised if you are a regular reader of this column, some of my articles about customer service are based on personal experience. And as I am sure I have said in nearly every one of those articles, ‘bad’ customer service experiences are usually going to be talked about more loudly, and to more people, than ‘good’ customer service.

Unfortunately, my latest tale is not a good one! I was recently dealing with a business on behalf of a client. The information I needed to access via my client’s online account (with their permission) was not appearing as it should and I needed to contact the business owner. The first issue was that there were no contact details on the business’s website – no email, no phone, no address, not even a contact form.

After finally tracking down an email address via an invoice, the communication that I received from this business was nothing short of astonishing! Not only did they fail to answer my questions, they grew increasingly rude and antagonistic with each email. The sender of the email began to write in CAPITAL LETTERS to emphasise frustration at my apparent stupidity and ended one email with ‘you are not my customer’.

It was this statement that was the most telling about this business. In business, everyone you come into contact with is your ‘customer’. The definition of a customer for this business is “someone who has paid me money and who is on my list of customers”. What they fail to realise is that potential customers will not convert into ‘paying customers’ if you do not already treat them as valuable. Add to this the fallout from negative feedback, and this business has done themselves an enormous disservice.

Michelle Grice writes a weekly column for business women in The Western Weekender