PBworks Official Blog

 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.

Organizations of all sizes share one common problem: cohesiveness

The decision making has become highly fragmented – from marketing, to sales, to engineering, to services and so on.

This makes sense from an internal perspective because we need to measure individual efficiency and productivity – we’ve been running this way since the first assembly line was produced. Of course, there are some benefits to this approach:

• Payrolls are down
• Efficiency is high
• Profits are good

The problem is that the improvements are inwards focused and don’t lend themselves to creating metrics around the customer experience. Customer service managers have a hard time getting customer service improvements prioritized properly – database upgrades, infrastructure, security, etc – these things eat up 99% of the customer service budget.

So how do we solve this?

Find ways to enhance customer service capabilities without scrambling for capital expenditure approvals and without bugging IT. This benefits the customer and the IT manager – SaaS is perfect for this. More appropriately, PBwiki is perfect for this.

We know most customer service related deployments take time. Integration and system change take time – with complex customer service systems, it can take months and even years to get things running properly. Instead, use PBwiki to centralize your product information, best practices or other proprietary knowledge so that your workforce is empowered.

A few weeks ago, we attended a summit put together by our friends over at Get Satisfaction and they launched something they call the Company-Customer Pact. As they put it:

This pact is a call for shared responsibility between companies & customers — one that promises that both sides will hold up their end of the bargain to change the game. The document provides a way to opt into a set of shared values. It’s a balanced statement of responsibilities for companies and customers.

You might wonder why we need this, as it seems like common sense. But if common sense were enough more people would be employing these principles now. We’ve been trained by the bad habits of corporate culture to turn away from the anger of alienated customers reacting to an environment where it’s common place for companies to hide behind phone trees, avoid fault, and employ anonymous and in-human call centers that makes them hard if not impossible to reach. Or by engaging in practices like price-gauging and issuing confusing bills and policies.

We’ve signed the pact and we’d love to encourage you to do the same – head over to ccpact.com today and get involved! You can also read Get Satisfaction’s full post here.