racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

One of my favorite writers and bloggers, Joel Spolsky writes an interesting piece on customer service. He says you won’t have to deal with irate customers, chargebacks, and bad reputations if you find solutions to problems early on, so you solve these at the root, and not when everyone and his uncle is already calling in to complain about lousy service. He also says that if you go to great lengths to please your customer, the return will be tenfold (or more).

We treat each tech support call like the NTSB treats airliner crashes. Every time a plane crashes, they send out investigators, figure out what happened, and then figure out a new policy to prevent that particular problem from ever happening again. It’s worked so well for aviation safety that the very, very rare airliner crashes we still get in the US are always very unusual, one-off situations.

One striking statement Joel makes is that in-house customer service is best, because outsourced customer relations management will not be able to adequately address issues at the source having no direct ties to whoever is developing the darn thing. Joel even specifically mentions the Philippines (along with Bangalore).

This perhaps will get negative feedback from those in the BPO industries, particularly those in my country. Believe me, I have several friends and relatives who work in call centers and other BPO firms, and I can say it’s been a boon, especially to people here looking for a decent living. They’re sort of the dream jobs of this generation.

However, I do agree with Joel that there’s something wrong with the concept of outsourcing customer relations. You’re basically letting someone else be the spokespeople of your company to the public. Never mind hiring PR firms for marketing. Never mind blogging about your stuff ’til kingdom come. If you don’t handle customer concerns personally then you’re probably only able to address their concerns on a superficial level. Then the problem will keep on happening, again and again, like a weed that will keep on growing unless you grab it by the balls roots and burn it to ashes.

Take for instance this recent issue with HP support that Technosailor Aaron Brazell wrote about. What about the PLDT CSR swearing incident? These things give your company a bad rap. And even if it’s only one customer that you end up losing, it’s the loss of goodwill that will ultimately kill your business one way or another.

So what saves you more money? Being stingy with costs but losing a bit of customer trust? Or being all out with customer relations and gaining more clients because of goodwill? It depends, of course, but it matters when it comes to what image you want your company to project.

One good solution would be to offshore, but still keep development and customer relations teams within the same company. Or perhaps you can be selective with the concerns that can be handled by the offshore customer service centers (like billing or other minor, non-critical stuff).

I’m not against business process outsourcing. Believe me, I consider BPO as a Godsend, too. I’m in sort of an outsourced business myself, since I blog for foreign-own sites and blog networks (which is in a way different from outsourced customer relations). But it’s a reality that companies and BPO providers will have to contend with sometime.

There are more. Joel writes seven–no eight–steps to remarkably good customer service. Read on. I hope you enjoy.

Remember, greed will get you nowhere.