How to Lose Customers (and Employees)

November 13, 2009 by Ed McLaughlin 

How many people work for your company? If more than a handful, chances are that you have a few policies. And the odds are just as good that one or more of these policies have irked a customer or two.

I run into these policies all of the time. So do you. But yesterday, one annoyed me so much I felt compelled to write about it.

For the record, I’m on my honeymoon. Which means that if a merchant wants to upset me, they have to work very, very hard to do it.

National Car Rental pulled it off.

The experience went smoothly at first. The night before, I reserved a car. When I got the agency the next day, a car was waiting. I provided the National agent with my driver license, as did my new bride. Fine. Then I handed her my VISA debit card for payment, and it all went downhill from there.

She looked at the card as though I had just given her foreign currency. “Um, you need a major credit card to pay for this car today.”

Here’s the thing – my new bride and I have a few policies of our own. For instance, we don’t use credit cards anymore. When it comes to paying for goods and services, the first thing out of our wallet is a debit card. The second is cash. There is no third option – if we can’t pay with the first two, we don’t make the purchase.

So I politely told the representative that I wanted to pay using the debit card.

“You’re both visiting here?” We nodded yes. “Well, then I can accept a debit card if you provide me with the confirmation number of your return flight.”

This, of course, made no sense. So I asked for an explanation.

“It’s company policy.”

“I don’t understand,” I replied. “If I pay you in advance for all charges, it shouldn’t matter if I use a credit card or not.”

She looked at us for a moment, and then just said, “I’m sorry, but that’s our policy.”

“Why don’t you explain the policy to me so that I understand it?”

The problem was, she couldn’t. And that’s the point of this post.

Let’s go back to the “no credit card” policy that my wife and I have. Why do we do this? Simple – we want to take care of our money, and that process starts with spending less than we earn. Eliminating credit card usage helps to ensure that we do exactly that. In short, our policy is easy to understand, and we can communicate it to anyone that asks us about it.

Not so with the National representative. Which was hardly her fault. After additional probing, I found out that the owner of that particular location instituted the policy with no explanation. She was just the messenger, and was frustrated with her inability to communicate the mandated rule.

So here’s the obvious idea. It’s fine if you have a policy, provided that you:

  1. Stop and actually think about what the policy means to you and your customers (in other words, it must be fair)
  2. Make certain that you and your employees can explain it to customers

Otherwise, the only thing the policy will result in is lost customers. That is, if you’re lucky. Because bad or poorly communicated policies might cause you to lose employees as well. After all, in all likelihood they are just as frustrated as the customer. I saw proof of this the other day. At one point during the discussion, my wife turned to me and said, “you know, I really don’t like this company.”

Not missing a beat, the National agent said, “Neither do I.”

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