Is your customer service team doing enough?

 I was reading an interesting article today that got me thinking about customer service:

An industry rule of thumb is that a bug which costs $1 to fix on the programmer’s desktop costs $100 to fix once it is incorporated into a build, and thousands of dollars if it is identified only after the software has been deployed in the field.

How true – sometimes just a little extra effort on the customer service end can alleviate a ton of pain down the road (both for you and your customers). With the rise of sites like Consumerist, the world’s becoming a smaller place – just today, a certain BMW dealer in the Mid-West got slammed for some poor handling of an Ebay transaction. What could have been a relatively easy sale turned into a 3 day long online bashing with over 200,000 page views.

The lesson: make sure you’re consistently trying to “WOW” your customers – they’ll thank you in return.