Service Vs Price – The Winner Is . . .

Posted by Edwin on Jun 6, 2009 in Blog | 1 comment

According to “Customer Loyalty : How to Earn It How to Keep It” written by Jill Griffin, it takes seven times the effort to find a new customer than it does to get business from an old one.

Today I was shopping for pens. I was buying my girlfriend a fountain pen for her birthday and we went straight to a specialist pen shop. The pens were lovely and we even had our own shop assistant patiently opening cupboards for us, dipping pens in ink and demonstrating the ease of use for each pen. We took up a lot of her time, but she seemed happy to serve us and told us her shop would be open all day. It was a pleasant experience. The shop was called T.Sharp (situated at the east end of the Hay St mall in Perth) and if I had my life to live over, I’d buy a pen there.

The next place we went to was David Jones. They had a small counter with pens in a glass case – mostly with the lids on, so it was difficult to differentiate the ball-points from the fountains. A 20 something girl was there to serve us. I asked her, “What’s the difference between these pens? Which are your fountain pens?” The girl told me that the ones with tips were all fountain pens, but she didn’t open the case and then she pretty much went off to serve another customer. She made it clear that she didn’t care. None of the pens were what we were after anyway, but they did have a 30% off end of financial year sale, so we stuck around a bit longer.

Finally we went to Myer. They had a whole section dedicated to pens, but no staff. They also had a 30% off sale and had the exact same pen we’d seen in T.Sharp. It took a long time to find a staff member with keys to open the pen cupboard, but finally we found a nice lady (middle-aged) with keys and she took a few pens out for us to look at. As the pens didn’t have ink in them, she couldn’t demonstrate their ease-of-use. She went away, leaving us with two or three pens to choose from. A few moments later she came back and, because of the sale, we purchased the pen we saw in the first shop.

Price and time remaining won over service, but it’s an interesting anecdote.