Four ingenious ways to make your customers hate your company

By Rod Jones?? ?Copyright reserved 2023? ??Version 1.0 at 19 October 2023

Who in their right mind would want to have loyal, dedicated customers?

Why would you want customers to increase their spending consistently?

What sane CEO or decision-maker would dream of creating a customer relationship management environment that guarantees sustainable revenues? Or one that achieves maximum customer lifetime value?

Why would one go out of one’s way to make the Customer Experience effortless and rewarding? Why would one care about driving business success and achieving tactical and strategic goals? Why bother about increasing profits and stakeholder value?

All this new-fangled Customer Experience (Cx ) stuff interferes with the tried-and-trusted ‘Henry Ford Approach’: “Here’s my product. Take it or leave it. There are lots more customers where you lot came from!”

What can you do to ensure your customers go to your competitors?

Who needs customers anyway? If your company is unlucky enough to have hordes of pesky, loyal customers, here are four ingenious ways to ensure that your customers hate you and that they will take their business elsewhere.

Terribly Ingenious Tip # 1

Know as little as possible about your customers.

Never, ever have accurate, up-to-date customer information. It’s a total waste of time. It takes up data storage space; you never use or analyse it anyway. Why have pesky details like email addresses, channel preferences, purchasing or service history, or demographic or location details? Why on earth would one want to know silly information like customers’ buying habits or recency and frequency? What an incredible waste of time and company resources. Throw it all out. Dump the data. Forget about analytics. You don’t need data to make good business decisions. Heck. Mr Kodak didn’t need data, nor did he need foresight or business insights.

Look at the practical side. Do customers actually expect to be treated as individuals? Do they really expect us to know their actual names? After all, you gave them an account number. What more could they possibly want?

When calling your call centre, do they expect to be greeted by name and given a truly personalised service experience? Don’t be silly. They can wait. And wait and wait and wait. They can listen to boring Beethoven or monotonous Mozart. You can tell them repeatedly that their call is important to you and that it's their duty to wait and to hold the line. Why not play a recorded message saying, “All our agents are far too busy doing other stuff to bother to take your call? Maybe call back another time. If you feel like it.”

Ridiculously Ingenious Tip # 2

Try not to make it easy for your customers. Make everything as difficult as possible.

There’s bound to be some research out there that proves conclusively that customers have all the time in the world. They thoroughly enjoy being kept on hold for hours on end. They really do enjoy navigating their way through complex IVR systems or web pages or sifting through hundreds of online FAQ’s.

I mean. Don’t customers get a thrill when they clearly state their problem or information needs to a call centre agent who promptly transfers the call? Customers just love repeating their stories over and over again. They just love it when they are prompted by the system for their account number, membership number or card number, and the first thing that the agent asks is, “Please give me your account number, membership number or card number”. You can literally hear the joy in customers’ voices when they engage with agents. It is such a thrilling experience for them.

And let’s not forget about using the tried-and-trusted method of ‘Bureaucracy’ to ensure that customers take their business elsewhere.

A good starting point is the classic “Five Page Form” method. Forget about allowing customers to complete forms online. That’s far too ‘Nouveau- Tech’. Heck no. Ensure they fill in all five pages – with a blue pen; otherwise, it will be rejected. And then, they will need to have it stamped and signed by their bank.

To be doubly sure that you are irritating them, make them have it stamped again by a Justice of the Peace before they scan the form and email it back to you. Oh yes. Please assume that all customers have email and scanning facilities and that they know how to use them.

And the form itself. Well. You know, all that information about the customer that your company already has on file, make customers fill it all in again. They just love knowing that your company couldn’t be bothered with them or making any attempt to reduce their effort.

Incredibly Ingenious Tip # 3

Totally ignore your customers.

Particularly in the retail environment or anywhere where your staff engage in face-to-face contact with customers, with just a little absence of training, you can ensure that your customers are decidedly irritated.

Avoid eye contact with the customer and converse with a colleague while half-heartedly serving the customer. Customers love hearing about your staff’s social activities whilst standing at the check-out counter. And don’t forget, common courtesies like “Please” and “Thank you” are so terribly old-fashioned.

Something else that you can do to ensure elevated levels of customer irritation is to encourage eating on the job. Let your staff speak to customers with their mouths full. In the call centre, let it be known that it’s just OK to munch away at one’s lunch whilst engaging with customers. “Who do customers think they are anyway?”

How do you handle angry or irritated customers? Easy. In the call centre, if they are not comfortable with a little conflict, agents can just hang up. Bolder agents can be encouraged to yell back at customers or to use obscene or profane language. It works like a treat!

Putting a call on hold is another wonderful way to infuriate customers. Don’t bother with music on hold. Just let the customer sit there listening to the hiss of white sound. And promising to call back a customer, and not doing it. This technique wins big points in the ‘How to irritate Customers stakes’.

Astonishingly Ingenious Tip #4

Hide behind the “It’s Our Policy” shield.

This one’s a real beaut. It’s Four guaranteed to ensure that any self-respecting customer will high-tail it off to your competitors in a heartbeat.

All you need to do is to compile a massive manual or handbook of incredibly complicated policies, processes and procedures. After that, every member of your staff can safely duck-and-dive any manner of demanding customers with a curt, “Sorry. It’s our policy”. That’s that. Not negotiable. Everyone can blame it on ‘management’ who, in turn, can blame it on ‘the risk and compliance committee’ who, similarly, will be able to pass the buck to ‘the consultants we brought in to create our policies’.

A refined and well-designed ‘Customer Deflection Policy’ will ensure that customers will never do business with you again. Try to make your policies as ambiguous as possible and always in the company’s favour. Allow your customer-facing staff to interpret these policies as they see fit and to blame everyone else but themselves for all product or performance failures. Ensure that staff are trained to let customers know that whatever the issue is, it’s their problem. Not yours.

Refresher: Do’s and Don’ts

1. Never listen to what your customers want or expect.

2. Do away with all manner of personal service. Customers are just numbers.

3. Sound like a robot. Respond like a machine.

4. Take your time. There’s no rush. Customers have all the time in the world.

5. The customer is never right. Whatever it is, it’s their fault.

6. Don’t have a Customer Experience (Cx) strategy.

7. Don’t let customer contact your company using their chosen channel. Cut costs and dictate your terms.

8. Make the Customer Journey as difficult as possible. Totally disregard anything to do with Customer Effort Management.

9. Customer Experience (Cx) Management is just a new-fangled fad.

10. Have a profound sense of humour. Revel in the irony. Appreciate the value of the tongue-in-cheek technique.

== END ==