Loyalty….to what and who?

Let me set the scene…..
A member of the golf club is unhappy with his wedges. I spend some time talking to him about why and what he is looking for in new wedges. I also advocate being custom fitted for any golf club, it is an investment after all! He is interested in changing from Ping to Cleveland.

I have got a spare set of Cleveland wedges of my own and to give the member great service I suggest that I loan him my own wedges (I hate other people using my golf clubs by the way! I see them as personal and precious tools of my trade). He thinks this is a great idea and off he goes onto the course to try them out for a few weeks.

I bumped into the member a few days ago and he said, “you can have those wedges back now”.
I was expecting the next sentence to be him confirming that he wanted to buy some. Wrong!
“I went to American Golf and they had them discounted so I bought them”.

At this point in the conversation there is now a discrepancy between what I was thinking and what I actually said.

This happens from time to time in golf. For me, these types of scenarios bring out more questions than answers.
Price must outweigh loyalty and service?
Does this person always regard lower price as most important when buying other things?
What more could I have done?

The list goes on for a while!

I agree with the idea that you can’t please all of the people all of the time. That is a futile battle.

It is easy to get disappointed by this kind of thing but it is just going to make me more determined to find better and smarter ways to breed loyalty from our customers (that’s part of the Vision for 2012).

Part of our current Mission Statement is “Customer Delight is our only goal”.

The end of this story is that our member was delighted with his new purchase!

There is another discrepancy between the end of this story and what is going on in my head………but I’ll work on it.