When Good News Backfires

What excites one customer has the potential to leave another miffed.

A price cut will upset the woman who bought yesterday. A free upgrade will irk the guy who doesn’t qualify. The new product that merges products A and B will alienate those who liked A and B just fine the way they were.

Some companies seem oblivious to this. Others formulate plans to minimize it. But even the best plans can fail to predict actual customer behavior.

The best companies don’t just plan. They are also willing to modify their plans when customers are upset.

Here’s a small example of this from an interview with entrepreneur David Eckoff.

David Eckoff: I just ordered an item on amazon.com recently and before it had even arrived, the price had declined. I got in contact with Amazon and on the technology side, they’ve got something on their website where they make it easy to get in touch with them. They don’t just publish their phone number, but all you have to do is enter your phone number and click and bang, they call you right back.

Stone Payton: Oh that’s cool. I didn’t realize that.

David Eckoff: But it gets better, Stone. It gets better because at this point you can imagine as a customer I’m not too happy that the price went down. I didn’t even have the item yet. So I asked them “Could you issue me a refund for the difference.” And I didn’t really think they would but I figured it was worth talking to them anyway since they made it so easy to get in touch. And you know, they did.

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