My word cloud t-shirt arrived today and it is lovely. Lovely quality and lovely to have it. If i feel rubbish i can look down and there is my life, right there where i can see it and be reminded of my mission statement. And of course, i do have an excellent showcase for it, so it is at a perfect angle for upsidedown reading 😀
Girls were out again and Amelie and Josie were tired and floppy and spent most of the day vegging. I got a lot of cuddles from Amelie and Josie mainly pootled about. Josie made me laugh today; Maddy did an oil pastel picture of LWW and then left the oil pastels out. I came back in to the room to find Josie on the table, scribbling all over it with a flesh coloured one. She took one look at me and started to cry!!!! 😆
Had a bizarre Magic Roundabout moment today – i put it on, pressed “play film “and Zebedee bounced over with a big red button and switched off my dvd player! In the end i had to start it using scene selection. I felt extremely picked on! And he made me eat a biscuit through sheer stress 😆
Fran and maddy are learning Little Mermaid songs; maddy is trying so hard to read the word sheets. We’ve all just done a singalong to them, helping her spot some words and read more Danny. Gosh i love that book.
Amelie has spent a lot of the day making presents for Buttercup, whose absence from her immediate vicinity she is increasingly intolerant about. It must be all of 6 weeks 🙄 I’ve sat open mouthed at my computer for much of the day, alternately rolling my eyes at rants and shutting them against the influx of work. All of which is excellent and exciting and so on but all a bit terrifyingly serious! Well no, the rants weren’t excellent, but well, sometimes you just have to walk away before you blow a hole in your own existence.
And then i got to wondering about customer service, on the back of the fact that you can buy a multi-region dvd player online but not from a shop thanks to someone’s mindless decision on how to complicate life. And i’m starting to wonder if there are many businesses left with an altruistic thought towards customers left? Just a thought about making life easier for the people who pay them for things. Increasingly i’m of the opinion that the people like that are the people running OSC shops from home and that the highstreet will re-emerge online as people get more and more sick of being treated like a number by huge nationals. I’d rather deal with me, if i’m honest, than somebody like Tesco, who sell everything but won’t remember that your daughter loves everything to do with seahorses.
But of course, what really mattered was the soul food that was Kris turning up and us getting to natter away in the strange but enjoyable bliss that was 5 less kids than normal.
Altruistic businesses don’t tend to make much money, she says from experience!
The rest sounds lovely 🙂
now your text makes sense! sorry I didn’t reply, I was being a bit thick as usual. would love to see the t-shirt.
But is your altruism to your customers really altruism? Are you really putting their needs before yours – if so why charge them at all – or is that you think treating people with respect is actually good for your business?
I am not saying that you ‘remember the seahorses’ as a commercial strategy, more that if doing it drove customers away, would you still do it, iyswim.
Richer Sounds sell multi-region in their shops – but P’boro don’t have one. Anyway I guess it isn’t the retailers choice not to sell them, they almost certainly wouldn’t be supplied them by the electronics companies.
I think mine extends to marking up my prices by a reasonable percentage for my time, rather than the max i can get. I’m the cheapest around normally becasue i charge what i believe is fair to me and them.
I remember details because i believe that treating people as individuals counts. I’ve been let down on a matter of trust only once as well, not too bad in 3 years.
You can get multi-region online; Rich said it was something to do with some oddly worded loophole, but i don’t know more than that.
I agree, I think treating customers respectfully *is* good for business. Not sure if altruism is the word I’d use though!
We remember details too (well, *I* do, lol) and customers do come back because of it. We currently have a car on our drive that some 4xreturning customers have put a deposit on but they can’t actually take it away until the end of the month – we won’t make much money on that but because they are loyal customers we did it.
Trust is a funny thing though, in business you can’t assume that people will honour it, as to them you are just another shop/place they can source whatever it is they are looking for, they don’t realise how personal it can be.
Yeah, i agree. But i do think that if you build up a relationship of sorts with people, they’ll try to deal with you first, or even tell you why they aren’t incase you can fix it.
BTW Sarah, did you see BM has a link to you?
I did, thank you 😉