Winning, Losing and Winning

摘要

There are three vendors that are difficult to replace: a dry cleaner, a bank where you are using their online services and a delivery service if you are a newspaper company. Just before Christmas, The Boston Globe took a chance and changed the vendors it used to deliver its morning newspaper. This decision turned out to be a disaster as the switch caused major headaches. Imagine getting your newspaper delivered in the same place, at the same time, every day for years, and then suddenly it's not there. Or, you have to go out and look for it or it comes later than it used to. Catastrophic? No. But the inconvenience was enough for customers to overwhelm the phone system at the Globe. Employees could not even make outgoing phone calls. At one point, the writers decided to pitch in and help out with the delivery of the newspaper. Cancellations increased by 30%. For an industry that has a churn - that is, customer loss - of 2-3% per year. This IS catastrophic.