Leicester City are an English Premier League football team (no honestly they are). This means that their revenue this year from TV alone will exceed £50M even if they finish last (which they won’t). Their ground holds 30,000 fans and will be full every game, they have many thousands of fans who don’t go every week but still follow the club and buy merchandise.
Bear with me if you have no interest in football. I’m getting to my point.
If you email them with a simple query (“where are my tickets?”) you get an auto response that says ‘you are very important’ to them and that they will get back to you in 3 days. 3 days! That’s the equivalent of 48 football games, which incidentally is an entire season of football.
I know this because I emailed them with said query and 18 days later am still waiting to hear back. That’s 6 whole seasons of games I’ve been waiting.
Leicester City are owned by a Thai family who also own the King Power chain of duty-free stores across Asia. You would have thought they’d know something about customer service. I’m sure they don’t leave their duty free customers hanging, waiting about to pick up their Glenlivet and Dolce and Gabbana. Let’s face it, there‘s a high likelihood they’d miss their flight wouldn’t you think?
And why is this sarcastic tirade against poor customer service on the 17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß blog you ask? Well it struck me that there are parallels (and whatever the opposite of parallels is) with our business.
17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß has a core of around 30,000 loyal photographers and many thousands of other shooters registered with us. So our ‘following’ is of similar size. 17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß Member Services answer emails from this ‘customer’ base of photographers within 1hr* and have done for years. That’s mid way through the second half of the first game of the season compared with six years of football if I stretch my analogy.
17³Ô¹ÏÔÚÏß 1 Leicester City 0
If I wasn’t ideologically, genetically and fanatically ‘wedded’ to Leicester City I’d be voting with my feet. I can’t change my allegiance to my football club but I’m well aware that photographers can pick and choose, so I thank you for continuing to work with us and we’ll happily continue to provide the same high level of service.
Thanks for listening.
*That’s 1 hr if the mail is received within office hours, it’s 24 hrs if outside of office hours which we are still very proud of, but didn’t want this small print to get in the way of a good comparison