Continuing on the thoughts from yesterday's post, there are other advantages of competing against your larger, slower competitors. Namely, they are often stupid.

The problem with huge corporations is that stupidity has lots of room to flourish. Quote me on that.

Consider the words of the great Minnesota Fats: "You don't learn from smart people, you learn from idiots. Watch what they do, and don't do it."

Want to see something stupid in the customer service category? A colleague of mine recently needed a receipt for a flight he had taken on Delta Airlines. Logically, he emailed to request. With a little less logic in action, Delta replied by email to tell him to snail-mail his document number to a certain department so they can email a receipt back to him. Meanwhile, his document number was in the email itself. Classic.

What is considered "normal" in your industry that drives customers nuts? Or confuses them? Learn from the big idiots, and give customers a clearly better way.

Labels: bad habits, customer service, customers, differentiation, marketing, planning