In my family, we are shopping to possibly make a switch in cellular service. Part of the reason for this is that, on this rare occasion, we have all five of our family phones paid off and it would be a good time to make a switch, if we wanted to do so. Part of the consideration is also our budget –we are about to add our teenage driver to our auto insurance policy and that’s going to be expensive, so we are looking to start saving money where we can.
But, honestly, part of the consideration is about relationships.
I got on our cellular provider’s website the other day, to see about upgrade options for our phones (is it me, or do they start to seem slow and old once you’ve got them paid off?), and I saw a price that I liked. So, I started the checkout process, and I got to the point where it was time to confirm the order and press the “Submit” button. That’s when I noticed that the price had more than doubled for the phone, from what I’d originally seen advertised on the website.
So I got into a chat with someone who told me that the advertised price wasn’t available for me, since I didn’t meet the qualifying conditions. I’d checked the qualifying conditions before moving ahead with things –> I thought that I met them. So, I decided to end the chat, not that upset about it, really. But, as I told the person on the chat that I was going to end the chat and investigate other options, that’s when the person on the chat told me that I could qualify for the advertised price after all.
And the whole thing ended up getting this stink to it and I closed the chat window. It’s been bothering me ever since.
Why would they jerk me around like that? I’ve been a customer of theirs for more than twenty years. How valuable is my relationship with them, in their eyes, when they treat me this way?
* * *
This was the last week of school for me for the year. And, at the beginning of the school year, when I was asked to identify my professional growth targets, I told my building administrator that I wanted to get better at student relationships, because I often have a hard time relating to students, especially those who don’t meet my performance criteria (if you get my drift).
And so, I started out the year with a survey that I gave to my students, asking them about what they thought of me as a teacher and about what they thought of my abilities in forming meaningful relationships with students, and I was going to take those results and use them as suggestions for growth, to be measured at the end of the year when I gave the survey a second time, to mark the changes that had occurred. But then, COVID-19 shut the school district down.
So, earlier this week, when my building administrator and I were reviewing my performance evaluation for the year, and it came time to talk about my professional growth targets, my boss told me that, during her observations of me (before the pandemic), she noticed that I was doing some things that she believed were going to be positive steps toward my goal. She then commiserated with me and said, “You and I are so busy with all that we have to do that it’s sometimes hard for people who are overworked to be able to take time to focus on the building of relationships.”
* * *
I guess that my two examples above have in common a ‘business’ element to them. And, when I stop to think about it, I guess the relationship that I am wanting to be able to rely upon in the first example is the same relationship that I am failing to provide in the second example to those ‘customers’ with whom I find it difficult to relate. Talk about hypocrisy!
When it comes to business, and the choices that we have as consumers to patronize businesses where our relationship, where our customer satisfaction, is of obvious value, I guess the choice is always there for me to stop doing business with those companies that don’t value me as a customer. The problem with finding a new cellular provider is that all of the cellular providers are massive national companies that are going to value any one single customer very little. Am I going to be any more important to one major company than I am to any other major company? Probably not.
It Occurred To Me Today 