[Vincent Ferrari]

Originally Posted by Sven

You are right though, good customer service isn't hard...if you have the money to spend on it, because it absolutely is a cost.

I don't remember saying it wasn't a cost. What I said was you can't view it as one, meaning you can't try and turn customer service into a profit center or rate its effectiveness based on how much it loses you.

Sure the bean counters need to know about the money, but customer service should not be constrained within a budget. Does that mean they should run wild? Hell's no. Most middle management dopes would become lunatics if that happened.

You can't make it profitable, so cutting corners, setting up horrific voice activated systems to keep people from reaching your employees, and restricting employees to questions and answers from a script (I called one time with a malfunctioning keyboard on my Dell Mini and they insisted on having me do Windows Update until there were no more updates just to prove that it wasn't a Windows Update issue. Has a keyboard problem ever been solved by using Windows Update?) may save you money in the long run, but they don't help your company.

And by the way, I don't know any company making a profit of 200%, although I reckon that was some kind of underhanded dig at Apple. If so, real original.

[Vincent Ferrari]

Originally Posted by Sven

You are right though, good customer service isn't hard...if you have the money to spend on it, because it absolutely is a cost.

I don't remember saying it wasn't a cost. What I said was you can't view it as one, meaning you can't try and turn customer service into a profit center or rate its effectiveness based on how much it loses you.

Sure the bean counters need to know about the money, but customer service should not be constrained within a budget. Does that mean they should run wild? Hell's no. Most middle management dopes would become lunatics if that happened.

You can't make it profitable, so cutting corners, setting up horrific voice activated systems to keep people from reaching your employees, and restricting employees to questions and answers from a script (I called one time with a malfunctioning keyboard on my Dell Mini and they insisted on having me do Windows Update until there were no more updates just to prove that it wasn't a Windows Update issue. Has a keyboard problem ever been solved by using Windows Update?) may save you money in the long run, but they don't help your company.

And by the way, I don't know any company making a profit of 200%, although I reckon that was some kind of underhanded dig at Apple. If so, real original.

[Jason Dunn]

Uh...is it really brag-worthy that 58% of Apple customers were happy with the level of support? That's a 42% "failure" rate if you look at it another way. Dell coming in at 46% isn't so far behind. Maybe this would be brag-worthy if Apple was up in the 70% range, but a 12% spread isn't massive.

I think good customer service IS hard actually - if it was easy, everyone would be getting 90%+ on these types of surveys.