Do you love your customers?

At Justaxi - the taxi comparison app for Manchester - we love our customers. 

We know we do and we plan to tell them this week coming up to Valentine's day. 

We also are asking them more and more about why they might love us back. but Seth Godin here has a good point about 'loving your customers....' 

There are two ways people think about this:

• We love our customers because they pay us money. (Inherent here is customers = money = love.)
• We love our customers, and sometimes there's a transaction.

The second is very different indeed from the first.

In the first case, customers are the means to an end, profit. In the second, the organization exists to serve customers, and profit is both an enabler and a possible side effect.

It's easy to argue that without compensation, there can be no service. Taking that to an extreme, though, working to maximize the short-term value of each transaction rarely scales. If you hoard information, for example, today your prospects will simply click and find it somewhere else. 

If you seek to charge above average prices for below average products, your customers will discover this, and let the world know. In a free market with plenty of information, it's very hard to succeed merely by loving the money your customers pay you.

Which is kinda why JusTaxi exists... we want to make sure people are getting true value for money in a world of symmetric buyer seller information. Just like Daniel Pink talks about. 

I think it's fascinating to note that some of the most successful organizations of our time got there by focusing obsessively on service, viewing compensation as an afterthought or a side effect. 

As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for people is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organization seeks.

Your customers can tell.

So the question for JusTaxi is how are they doing? Are they truly loving our customers? 

And perhaps more importantly - who really are our customers in the first place. The taxi drivers, the taxi operators, the taxi firms or the people booking a taxi in Manchester?