Customer service, plus organization and common sense make businesses survive. You can have the best marketing droids in the world, but if your customer service and effectiveness in delivering a real, usefull, product aren't there, your business will die. It will die slowly if it attained monopoly status before greed and idiocy took over, but it will die.
Yet I see small, medium and large businesses forget that the customer needs to be satisfied, the product needs to work, and information needs to be found! If it's a service, the service better be right, and the billing better be accurate! Do these people really think I'm going to continue to patronize a business that treats me like a neccessary evil, and a stupid one at that??
You want to know part of why places go down the tubes? Because their customer service and internal processes stink.
Take WorldCom. They had long hold times, broken promises about things getting fixed (with billing or service)! Their communication with their offices and representatives was broken - which led to billing messes - mostly to the detriment of the customer. One day I called them and the phone wasn't even picked up!
Or take hardware manufacturers. Believe it or not, people at home and in industry really do run Linux on their machines. So why won't they just port their drivers and make they easily available? A Linux/BSD compatible driver has to be easier than coming up with something for all those versions of Windows. Oh, no, the customer doesn't need that, they're not smart enough to run anything but the Windows junk preinstalled on their system.
Yes, some folks are stupid. But institutionalized stupidity in return is not the answer.
Posted by ljl at February 18, 2003 04:47 AM | TrackBack