PCs and Customer Disservice

Computerworld has an interesting article about just how bad call centers can be. CFI Group Worldwide LLC in Ann Arbor published a study of customer satisfaction with phone service in six industries. On the top were catalog companies - no surprise, as customer unhappiness means losing sales. And at the bottom were PC vendors. Between offshoring and having inadequately trained people to save money, the companies actually paying a heavy price:

According to the survey, nearly 73% of the people who have bad experiences with their PC companies' call centers said they will consider purchasing their next PCs from another company, while 85% of customers who had their problems resolved by calling a PC call center said they would continue doing business with the company. But only 33% of customers whose problems were not resolved said they would continue doing business with a PC company, according to CFI Group.

The PC industry is particularly bad, but many companies treat customer service as an expense. That is foolishness. Customer service and handling complaints is in reality one of the most effective forms of marketing the business can have. When you satisfy someone, you make it far more likely that they'll do business with you again. That lowers overall costs for new customer acquisition and increases the lifetime value of customers, which should translate into higher profitability. When you think you're saving costs by sending work offshore - and actually, experts say that the real savings is only about 20% of what the business function would run domestically - you're actually undercutting your own business. For gosh sakes, 25% of the callers to the PC companies hang up before they can get an issue resolved. That's a powerfully large group of people to antagonize. It's another example of short-term thinking and not seeing how the parts of a business come together.