I had a dreadful customer service experience with Fujitsu last week trying to get my home air conditioner serviced. As I told them they had lost a customer, they tried desperately (within 10 minutes) to resolve my problem. My actual problem was trying to get the unit serviced – they failed at even putting me through to their service centre (they tried 3 times and still failed) and when they manually tried to resolve my issue, they’ve still failed. 3 days later and they’ve still failed.

Fujitsu’s failure reminded me of this exact story I read that online retailers are failing in customer retention . I even warned Fujitsu that I’d be writing about them and how it’s going to cost them more to replace me as a customer than it would have been to simply solve what I considered a pretty simple problem. Being in agency-land, I used to hear quite often that the client is always right. Now we all know that isn’t true, but I used to remind my teams that if we didn’t have clients, we wouldn’t have jobs. If customer service (incorporating all things service) is the funnel to customer retention then I really don’t understand how any online retailer cannot put this within the first 5 agenda items of the new financial year’s strategy.