Talking with your customers

Minor changes in the Base­camp pric­ing struc­ture (which is just fine and not the point), com­ments from the customers.

While old news in the won­der­ful com­mu­nity of the inter­web, that ‘mar­kets are discussions’-thing sure is some­thing, huh? When was the last time your tele­phone com­pany dis­cussed their pric­ing model with you? How come cer­tain com­pa­nies (like the Dan­ish post, pub­lic trans­porta­tion etc.) increase prices by a lot more than infla­tion dic­tates and don’t explain them­selves to you? It’s so sim­ple, yet I con­tinue to be amazed how noone expects to be informed. “Oh, so you’re chang­ing my cable-tv plan, caus­ing a 34% increase in price? Ok, I’ll just pay.“

I guess it’s hard run­ning a larger busi­ness, decid­ing how to run cus­tomer ser­vice, what to charge peo­ple, when to speak and when to shut up. Oh, that last one was easy — speak up — always! And you might make the wrong deci­sion once in a while. But as long as you com­mu­ni­cate, I’m sure peo­ple will for­give and for­get. If you wanna play hard­ball, pro­duce bad prod­ucts or what­ever AND don’t wanna talk, well then I guess you just don’t want my money.

I hereby declare 2005 ‘talk to the wallet’-year (think a ‘talk to the hand’-kinda ges­ture). Cap­i­tal­ism is here, so get that polit­i­cal consumer-thing going; let the wal­let do the talking.

It takes time, yes, and I imag­ine it’s pretty damn hard find­ing a decent sneaker com­pany, a well-behaved major record com­pany etc. etc., but I’ll give it a try. I’ll put on my Nikes and run out to my SUV and go change bank this very minute. I don’t like the way they han­dle online bank­ing from my Mac.