For many years, conventional business wisdom held that a
satisfied customer might mention your company to one or two people, but a
dissatisfied customer would tell nine. Today, the average Facebook user has 140
friends who will surely be instantly notified of customer service
transgressions. Millions of people write blogs, and while many may have no
readers at all, many others boast readership far exceeding the nine people an
unhappy customer of the past would contact.

One might think that widespread, credible, instantaneous
communication puts a lot of power into consumer's hands, and it does, but one
would also have to wonder why bad customer service is still so prevalent.

In a blog entry called The
Rise of Business Populists, Fast Company cofounder Bill Taylor quotes a
Harvard Business Review article that pretty much explains why bad service
persists: it's profitable. Mobile phone companies, for example, all find
slightly different ways to mistreat their customers, but there seems to be an
unwritten understanding that all of them will "infuriate their customers by
binding them with contracts, bleeding them with fees, confounding them with
fine print, and otherwise penalizing them for their business."

Consumers cannot exercise their ultimate power - the power
to vote with their wallets - until they have a slate of candidates.
Dissatisfied customers have a louder voice than ever, but the power in that
growing chorus accrues to entrepreneurs. When companies habitually abuse
customers, Taylor points out, "...it constitutes an open invitation for
blank-sheet-of-paper newcomers to right wrongs and change the game."

He cites Southwest Airlines as an example - noting that its
recent decision to not charge for checked bags is part of its long-term
strategy to simply treat customers better than its competitors. Any first year
economics student recognizes that availability of substitutes significantly
impacts price elasticity. If there were no Southwest Airlines, the other
carriers would not have to charge for bags because they would still be charging
two-to-three times as much for each ticket. Southwest changed the game in 1971 by
focusing on customers, and the other airlines still cannot figure it out.

Some people think they cannot be entrepreneurs because they
don't have a big, new idea, but you don't have to invent something new to be an
entrepreneur. You just have to solve a problem. Aspiring entrepreneurs should
search the Internet every day for customer service horror stories.  These companies are vulnerable to
competition and their customers are looking for an alternative. Why shouldn't
it be you?