Customers are stupid: what can we do about it?

Wouldn't it be so much easier to deliver a great customer experience if customers weren't so stupid? I am a customer of Easyjet and today had a real stupid customer experience. A few weeks ago I booked a flight, and took the easy option of agreeing to add their single trip insurance to the deal. Smart people read the small print, within the 14-day cooling off period, to be sure that the policy meets their needs. Real people ('stupid customers') have busy lives and check the policy only a few days before they travel.

Discovering that the policy didn't meet my needs, I called, more in hope than conviction, to ask if they would refund the policy. I haven't made a claim and I haven't taken a flight. I decided it would be a good test of whether they would see the potential of a long term brand advocate. Of course you already know the outcome. The terms of the policy were quite clear. I have no right to cancel. There is nothing they can do.

Really? Nothing they can do? Is there nothing in their customer strategy that acknowledges the relative cost of acquiring a new customer compared with retaining an existing customer? Nothing that recognises that if you take one simple step, costing you almost nothing, to put the customer first, you won't have to invest so much in marketing activity to replace him? Nothing about empowering customer service representatives to play their part in managing customer value rather than simply processing customer transactions?

Today the inevitable post-customer service experience survey arrived in my inbox. Having worked my way through the tick boxes, I reached the 'any other comments' box. I typed three or four sentences about my experience and pressed 'submit'. I was feeling quite virtuous, helping them by providing feedback after such a disappointing experience. My reward: an error dialogue box, informing me that my input contained too many characters. This is how much they value my feedback: they value it so much that it may not be much longer than a tweet.

In this extraordinary world of sophisticated strategies, leading edge technology and integrated customer experience management, we all too easily forget the basics:

Make retaining customers a fundamental part of your customer strategy. Empower customer service representatives to pursue long term value, not just short term income. Give the customer a real opportunity to tell you how they are feeling. And do something about it.

Otherwise your stupid customers will become the smart customers of someone else's business.