The Tao of Customer Service…
… is the true Tao.
Of the part of my high-tech life spent in California, almost all was spent in some type of customer service (the customer service groups were PROFIT centers, NOT cost centers!), even the project management part of my high-tech life. This fact accounts for my strong belief that customer service is a core part of any business – a belief that I have incorporated into my OWN business. So… I was amused and delighted to read Rafe Needleman’s Groundhog Day article, “From Dell Hell to Genius Bar: a customer service journey.” I recently had an experience with Intuit’s outsourced Indian technical support that reminded me of Needleman’s experience with Dell, EXCEPT that the Intuit representative actually HUNG UP on me after telling me that he would help me! 
Irony? Maybe he did!
I first wrote about outsourcing and offshoring (“A few words about outsourcing/offshoring“) in the very first month of this blog, in September 2007. The support call mentioned in that blog was with Adobe Systems. It seems that the stupidity of offshoring is only NOW, almost five years later, starting to bite some of the companies that were responsible for so many layoffs in high tech. I, for one, was glad to hear of President Obama’s initiatives to reward companies that keep American jobs on American soil (or that RETURN them to American soil). Many businesses are not run by anyone intelligent enough to see the obvious – that destroying your employees is destroying your customers.
But I digress….
Rafe Needleman admits, “I didn’t get how important support was.” He still used the wrong verb tense – he means, “…how important support IS!” His comment about his experience with Dell…?
“Nobody disrespects a customer like that and keeps their business for long. No matter how great the person is who tries to make up for it.”
Remember that statement, GOOD customer service people who work for companies that don’t care. You cannot save such companies, and such companies will not recognize and reward your work. Go work for a company that “gets it.”
Rafe contrasts his experiences with Dell and Apple. As for Rafe’s bad luck with Apple hardware… maybe he does not know that Apple machines can pick up on the “bad vibes” emanating from long-time Windows users, and the boxes have their own ways of making these users “repent.” Rafe notes that: “With Apple, you can just tell: service is part of the product. It’s not an afterthought, farmed out to subcontractors. Apple, clearly, takes a service call as an opportunity to reinforce the brand message, not just to fulfill a contractual duty to honor a warranty.”
The best two sentences in the extremely well-written article…?
“Every time I have had to deal with a broken Apple product, the experience has left me liking Apple products more. That is one hell of a trick.“
And it is a “trick” that ALL smart businesses should learn….
-Bill at
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