Customer Suppport - Is that SO HARD!

It's been a BUSY month and I am sorry to say that it has had an effect my blog time! Sometimes anger is the greatest motivator, and I just had to vent yet again on poor customer service. Why is it so hard for some to help people? Answer their most basic questions? Or give a damn? Yes you've guessed it, more fun with tech support! I have been working with a script provider and really love its functionality, customization features, reasonable price (should have tipped me off!), but after months of faithful service, it suddenly stopped working correctly and is acting buggy. So I contact the company, which was oh so friendly and ready to help me when I was at the sales level, but now can't be reached. I go through their help desk and two days later I get a response! (Now mind you I am very independent, and I will spend hours if not days looking for the source of problems so I can fix them myself and better yet have the knowledge to fix them again in the future. I had reached a complete impasse and new that I was at the point where only they could offer assistance. So I am would not consider myself a resource drain, and don't ask obvious question or fail to research solutions in help literature.)When I do get a response I am told there is nothing wrong?! And a lame blaming of the web server, which I know can't be the issue, even according to their own literature! I pursued my question again and was told basically "nothing to see here, just keep moving along." I couldn't believe I was being blown off.

I finally figured it however. Oh not the solution to my scripting problem, that never did get resolved. I am currently working with a entirely different script and rebuilding everything from scratch! Twice the cost, twice the design time! But I did figure out a sad and basic fact, once a sale's been made for many companies, you no longer matter. You will now only cost the company in resources and time and in their narrowly focused mind not be "worth it". Even if you might have purchased something from them again, its worth losing that sale to just get rid of you so they don't have to focus on unfun stuff like support.

Unfortunately this is all too common an approach or even a business model for web companies today and reflects poorly on the web development community as a whole. For the minority of us out here trying to provide good products AND service it makes our job of gaining customer trust even more difficult. To me its simple: Mean what you say, follow through on a promise, and stand behind your products! If you don't know the answer admit it, then try to find the solution. If you can't find a solution be willing to call in others (and if need be pay!) for outside assistance to get it right for your customers. If you still can't solve the problem, give them their money back.

Obviously this doesn't apply if the problem is on the customer end and you know if for a certainty. But even then it is your responsibility to educate the customer as to the cause of the problem and what they need to do to fix it. Maybe even refer them to someone or give them a link to a place where they can get help, etc. Is that SO HARD! I know it will take time and you won't make any money doing it, but it is the right thing to do. Perhaps as a business owner you will need to increase your prices or rates to help cover the additional cost of support. You may loose some price only driven customers, but the ones you get will be very please with your product and will find the extra cost worth it in peace of mind and reliability.

Ok rant done!

Thanks,
Terri Miller
Miller Enterprises