The wrong vintage

Increasingly vigilant buyers are no longer prepared to pay through the nose for an immature technology

Thanks to a tip from a wise gentleman I can refer to only as the Silver Fox, I have learned that when you order wine in a restaurant, the vintage on the bottle you are presented with is not always the same as the one you picked from the menu. It may be from the right region and brand, but it is often a different year.

Now I am no wine buff, but I can tell that this a scam. I have observed it to be commonplace in restaurants, and if you are not vigilant you can easily end up paying more for an inferior product.

But restaurants are running a risk; although these incidents can be passed off as an oversight on the part of a busy waiter, they can also create an atmosphere of distrust, promote bad customer relationship management and even result in lost business.

The same is true in business. In many instances vendors have sold end-users the benefits and functionality of, for example, a fully mature CRM product, when in actual fact the product is at an earlier release stage.

Like the inferior vintage of wine, it may look the same and appear to have the same functionality as its superior cousin, but it has not matured enough to warrant the price tag on the box.

The end result is often the same as in the restaurant. The customer's expectations have not been managed and he or she may feel cheated in some way.

When it comes to the next round of IT spending you may find you can't even get through the door.

This is bad timing. IT's tarnished reputation is only starting to recover from the damage done by the year 2000 remediation fiasco and other large-scale projects that have failed to deliver what was printed on the label.

In some cases, customers must feel like they have ordered a Barolo and been left with a Beaujolais, even though the bottle claims otherwise.

The recession hasn't helped, and budgets have only recently started to trickle back.

So when the doors that haven't opened for a while start to open again, remember this: customers are much more vigilant today, and they expect that the product or service that they order should conform to the highest business standards.