My two young daughters, ages 5 & 6, have been enrolled in one-on-one swim lessons for almost two years. They've enjoyed the experience and have become pretty good swimmers over the past year. The swimming pool has four quarterly swim lesson periods for which parents have to register. For some reason, I didn't receive the email notification this time and, because life has been chaotic in this past month, didn't realize that winter quarter was ending and spring registration was nearly over. (I know that you've been in a similar spot yourself at least once and will judge me kindly!)

Imagine my surprise when I logged into the website this afternoon to see the announcement on the homepage: "Spring quarter registration is now closed." I called the office to see if anything could be done and heard:

No, I'm sorry, registration is closed.
There are no slots available.
You can register for summer quarter.
We can't possibly notify our customers, even long-term customers, to remind them to register.
We can put you on a waitlist but there probably won't be two spots on the same night.
There were signs posted at the swimming pool. You should have seen them.

All of the statements made above are true statements. But the bottom-line is that they just lost me as a customer. I've now registered my children for swim lessons at a different pool. If they had a moment of enlightened self-interest, they might have handled this entire situation differently.

For starters, shouldn't you be curious if a long-term customer (we've registered two kids for the past 9 quarters) suddenly stopped registering? Wouldn't it make some sense to pay attention to loyal customers and make sure that they haven't fallen through the cracks? How hard would it be to make a phone call to your current customers and ask them why they hadn't registered? Wouldn't that give you useful information, not to mention, an opportunity to save a customer relationship? And, if your loyal customer resurfaces after registration is closed, aren't there better options for handling the situation, then restating your policies?

Every time I experience frustration, I try to mine it for useful lessons. I'll be thinking about how these lessons transfer to the way we handle our long-term customers at NetSpeed Leadership. But at a minimum, I pledge that we will: Avoid making assumptions. Check in to find out what's up. And then do what we can to give our customers options that meet their needs.

What are you doing to retain your loyal customers? Yours for better customer service!