Recommendations and referrals from customers are the lifeblood of almost every business.  If your customers will recommend you, you've got something.  You can really run your business off that simple metric... the net result of everything you do comes down to making a product/service that is so good customers will actually stake their own name on recommending you.  Some call it the Net Promoter Score, or the Ultimate Question.

There is also another side to the equation - what's in it for the customer in recommending your business?  What do they get out of it?  At Prizzm we are putting some technology behind helping your customers recommend you, but the heart of why customers recommend businesses is not about technology or rewards.

There is something very human, and satisfying in giving those you like a recommendation.  Here is an email exchange with a company I liked, and didn't give much thought to saying thanks.  But I made their day!  And when I got the reply back, it kind of made me happy, and made my day! 

Isn't that fun??

Recommended:  Betty Normenday (and Ann Corkery) from Fidelity National Title: http://www.fidelitysfmarin.com/pages/meet-our-escrow-officers-347289

"Obviously, customer service "after a sale" isn't this national big box chain's policy from the top down. National news reported at Christmastime they oversold and couldn't meet deliveries before Christmas on certain product(s). Shame on them!"

http://www.rgj.com/article/20120118/FERNLEY08/201180352/Shame-businesses-put-...

I've had a terrible issue with credit cards lately, both AMEX and Bank of America. But Bank of America is taking the cake - I'm on my 6th transfer right now.  During one of these interactions, I got a customer satisfaction survey.  This being a very important issue to me, I took extra time to start filling it out...

and filling .... page after page

  and filling..... page after page...

I'm only at 28%, at a massive matrix table.  This is my second day.. being distracted it is still up.

What information does BofA *think* they are getting about customers satisfaction by asking this many questions?  How bout asking one question - "do you recommend us" ? You will get everything you need there BofA, you don't need this fodder for middle managers.

Wow, it's amazing how stupid corporate systems can be.. and how carefully you are being tracked, often with the wrong information.  I shouldn't be surprised actually, as I have spent so many years installing systems and seeing the lumbering lumbering incompetence of sprawling bureaucracies..  but.. it's not fun to be on the other side.  

My story:

I have a relatively new AMEX Open business credit card that was cancelled today.. It turns out it was because:

- A fraud alert in September cause us to shut down our *personal* account and reopen it at Bank of America, moved the money to a new account

- That caused an overdraft fee (even though we had all the money in the new account) - BofA did not automatically remove the overdrafts as they said they would. I didn't know about the fees - or even know I had that card frankly.

- Bank of America never bothered to call, ask, write about the credit card.. They never sent a statement (supposedly emailed?). They did however, cancel the account and report it to the Credit Bureau.. not the best way to treat your customers guys.. or get paid, you could have just asked for the money, right??

- American Express then took the liberty of looking at the $199 owed, and canceling my *business* credit card.. even though:

-- BofA made the original mistake

-- My business has 30x the amount of assets *in the bank* than the entire amount of the credit line AMEX  cancelled

So AMEX, you stupid robot.. you made a bad call..the wrong call, if you were judging credit risks. You lost my business, that you could have profited from,  pissed me off, wasted a *ton* of my time  with your *stupid* system, that spit out the wrong set of information, and didn't listen.  

You did alert me if Bank of America's almost equal stupidity.. I'm not sure who I'm more pissed at, I suppose AMEX.. Open for business my ass.  

Amazon has a yearly revune of 43billion dollars it looks like.. and I wouldn't look for that number to go down anytime soon, and if I was a competitor I'd be (more) worried about them.  

As a customer, I had recent interaction that basically blew me away.  The story:

I purchased 2 orders of books recently, after not submitting a Amazon order for quite some time. One on Jan 1st and one on Jan 7th.   Well, it looks like I had left my old address in there as a "ship to" address.  I did have the correct billing address.. it is possible that Amazon checked me out and did not confirm my address (don't recall), but basically it is my fault, I ordered books and had them sent to the wrong address.

So I pinged Amazon on the help site, which wasn't hard to get to (maybe not perfectly inuitive), was able to choose email as my preferred channel.  I described the problem, and figured they would ask  me to try to retrieve them, maybe give me a disocunt... but no, the replied back, appologizing, and reshipped the orders! I was really, pleaseantly surprise. No calls, no procedures checked, the agent who replied just took care of it.

It seems like a unprofitable process.. just ship new orders with no questions?

Well, the profit side of Amazon, at 1.75 Billion, tells a different story.. *excellent* customer service can pay off.  I know I am putting in my next order right now, while raving about them on this blog post.