Customer service. Sometimes this happens as a result of a real desire to please and sometimes just as a result of competitor pressure.
Having just had the old ‘I’m afraid not’ response to a reasonable request to buy something slightly non-standard, today’s invention is a website for crowd-sourcing, for each company, a list of most-direct competitors. These might be ranked by customer ratings, or whatever, with only say the top three competitors appearing.
Consumers would then know who to talk to next and companies would know they knew.
