02. Why You Must Ensure Your Customers Never Get ‘The Mushroom Treatment’ – Part I Copy

Why You Must Ensure you’re your Customers Never Get ‘the Mushroom Treatment’-Part I

The Titanic disaster

One of the most tragic stories from the Titanic disaster involves the Allison family ; Hudson J.C. Allison, his wife Bess and their young children, Loraine and Trevor. Traveling with them was the family nurse, Alice Cleaver.

After the collision with the iceberg, the Allisons and Alice Cleaver were in the Allison stateroom. All of a sudden, Alice grabbed Trevor and left the stateroom, without informing Mr and Mrs Allison where they were going.
They got into lifeboat number 6 and were later rescued.

Mr and Mrs Allison, however, had no idea that their son was safe. They spent the rest of the time searching for him, even turning down the chance of lifeboat seats for Bess and Loraine. They all died when the Titanic sank, with Loraine being the only first-class child fatality.

Now, failing to keep your stakeholders abreast of developments might not always result in such catastrophes, but can have many ramifications. Surely, we have all heard of, or have personally experienced, customers miffed by a lack of updates from service providers.

Of course, you know that frequency of communication with customers is paramount. And, yet, despite the vexation it can cause, this is an error that service providers often commit, much to the chagrin of the customer.

Stop Giving Customers the Mushroom Treatment

Customers detest being given the ‘mushroom treatment’: while growing mushrooms, they are kept in the dark, covered with fertilizers and later hacked. Customers feel just the same when they are not frequently communicated to, and informed only when the situation is completely out of hand.

Here’s a question for you to ponder upon: have you had customers complain to you about being treated similarly?

We hope not.

Now, this begs the question: if frequent communication with the customer helps manage expectations and provide them with a superlative experience, why do service providers often fail to do so?

Why people fail to communicate frequently

Here are three reasons that we at CitrusLearning have found for lack of frequent and prompt communication:
1. Lack of Time:
Let’s face it: we are all multi-tasking. Free time is at a premium. Finding the time for communication is difficult, as much as you want to do so. The temptation in such circumstances is to ignore proactive, prompt and frequent customer communication.

2. We Hope Things Will Get Better:
We also refrain from sharing bad news for the fear of being reprimanded, or being exposed for our mistake.
Other times when we are faced with a service failure, we attempt to resolve it on our own, which is not a bad thing in and of itself. However, the consequences of keeping the customer in the dark can be far worse like in the tragic case of the Allison family.
Customers have a right to know everything, and it is thus important to keep them in the loop.

3. We Don’t Think That it is Important:
At times, a customer’s problem does not feature on our priority list and we fail to attach importance by keeping the customer informed about the progress.
However, as we have seen, frequency of communication with one’s customer is of paramount importance in ensuring customer delight.