We have spoken internally about how important it is for us to keep customers.

With a recurring business model even if your acquisition of customers is slow, so long as you keep every customer you win, you can at least mark a date on the calendar when you will be in good shape. As soon as we have mProperty live we will be building in the customer service features.

Scott Carson, mentioned this on the Carsonified blog a while back and I agree with his sentiments. Build in your customer service features into your app and also empower your support people to use them. For example, we need to have a button for refunds in our back office and anyone who is dealing with a customer has to have the power to click on it.

Anyway, the main point of this post was Dyson. Seven years ago I bought a Dyson DC01, their first mass market model. Over last weekend it's main belt broke due to me not cleaning out some crud that got caught up in it. I considered buying a new one but I decided to chance giving them a call. Their phone system was quick and to the point, no shouting "One", "Two" down the phone. I spoke to someone quickly who took my address who agreed to send out the belts for the price of postage only. Considering this was a seven year old vacuum cleaner which only had a five year guarantee I thought this was great. I have since told several people how good they were about it. And I would definitely buy another.

So they prove the point up above. My seven year old cleaner will probably die sooner rather than later anyway, and for the price of one piece of rubber they have ensured I will spend about three or four hundred euro with them in the near future.