SBA * Consulting LTD

If you said "bad customer service," you're correct!

With today's shortened market cycle, companies are racing to establish and maintain a presence. But whether it's a brick-and-mortar or a click-and-mortar, the worst thing a company can get is a bad reputation.

And the fastest way to establish and keep a bad reputation is by providing bad customer service. No longer can your company hide behind voicemail, or sit and wait for the postal service to deliver that complaint letter. With the introduction of e-mail and the Web, customer service is now at the forefront of every business.

Think about the importance of customer service. How many times have you sent e-mail to a vendor or supplier, only to suspect it must have been delivered to nowhere.

To showcase how poor customer service can affect not only your company and customers, but also the entire industry, just think of Christmas 1999-2000. During that holiday season a mere two years ago, what one topic was constantly in the news? E-tailers failing to deliver merchandise that was ordered and the poor service the customers then received.

The traditional press--TV, radio, newspapers--and the trade press were riddled with stories lamenting the poor performance of companies, and how customers failed to receive information from customer service when they inquired about their purchases.

What went wrong? Simply stated, those companies installed and implemented systems that were untried and untested in a real-world scenario. The systems immediately became inefficient and overburdened, and then they broke.

While problems like this are not surprising in a young, inexperienced marketplace, it was the industry's response to those problems that became its own worst nightmare. Those same e-tailers insulted their customers by trying to deceive them, thereby violating Marketing 101, Lesson No. 1: Never, ever lie to a customer!

Your customers and clients now have a new avenue by which to query your business: the Internet. Between Web pages and e-mail, the speed at which information can flow has changed the landscape. Expectations have also changed, and they haven't gotten lower.

Up until just a few short years ago, customer service was a long, drawn-out process. Accordingly, businesses were able to divert their resources away from customer service, which was considered a nonproductive activity, toward productive activities.

Why was customer service considered nonproductive? Why did companies that invested large amounts of time, money and reputation allow themselves to provide bad customer service? Because, for the most part, people couldn't spread rumors or facts about poor service.

The consumer was trapped. Traditional businesses had geographic areas or product lines that they serviced, and they were able to brush aside any customer negativity by just plain ignoring it. When a brouhaha surfaced, the company dealt with the problem, thus saving face and enhancing its reputation.

Don't get the feeling that you, the VAR, are exempt from providing good customer service. In fact, as a VAR, you should be even more in tune with the needs of your customers. Many VARs today either have locks on the geographical market of certain products they carry, or they are one of only a handful of VARs that market these products. Should the customer need or want this product, they don't have much choice. But that's no excuse.

A VAR that I'm familiar with is a reseller of a certain brand of software. When asked by a consultant whether or not the new version performed a specific function, the VAR answered that the consultant didn't have a service contract, and thus the VAR couldn't answer the question. Needless to say, the consultant was not happy with the "answer"--or the VAR.

For many VARs, customer service is looked at as a pure profit center. Our previous example shows what happens when you take this money-centric view. You end up losing sales and good will.

How many hardware or software manufacturers would you deal with if you had to pay them each time you needed to get an update or a fix, or access their knowledge bases? Probably fewer than you are using now, right? For the VAR, customer service is a catch-22: You don't want to give away the shop, but you also don't want to charge clients when the invoices will infuriate them.

For example, when Symantec first published its now-famous Norton AntiVirus software, it provided updates to the virus signatures for free. But with the explosion of computer viruses and the increased costs associated with research and development, as well as other costs involved in creating the technologies used in pushing these updates, Symantec needed to modify its approach. The solution the company devised was to provide one year of free updates and then charge for a subscription service for the updates.

VARs need to recognize not only the value of providing good customer service, but the need to provide that service in an accurate and timely way. In the book--then a play recently revived on Broadway and a movie--"How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," by Shepherd Mead, it was thought that the worst place to end up was in personnel--at least in 1952.

Recently it became customer service. Today, a VAR needs to seed customer service with some of its most experienced technicians, support people and managers. It is those people who will be able to make or break the VAR's business, by projecting an air of concern and professionalism, or, in the negative, by careless, lackadaisical performance or just plain rudeness.

Customer service should be a key element in your business. Just as some companies have presales and postsales teams, think of customer service as your pre- and post-customer team, making sure that a customer stays a customer.

This past Christmas season, those same e-tailers woke up and smelled the proverbial coffee. They made enormous changes to both their infrastructures and their Web sites. They became responsive and proactive. There was a lot of bloodletting, but those companies that remained after the debacle of the year before, on the whole, had a positive season. In short, they learned their lesson about customer service.

Have you learned yours?

Wayne Spivak is the president of SBA Consulting in Bellmore, N.Y.

10 Tips For VAR Customer Service
1. Provide easy ways for your clients to contact you, including phone and fax numbers, e-mail and Web addresses.
2. Create lists of frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the products you market. This will save time and money.
3. Write back. E-mail should be answered by first an autoresponder, telling the sender you have received the e-mail and giving a reasonable expectation of when you will be following up.
4. Follow up. After the autoresponse, e-mail should be answered by a real person with a real return e-mail address--not the autoresponder address.
5. Post a clear and concise customer-service policy on your Web site and include or link to it in your responses to customer service inquires. The policy should dictate when free customer service becomes a billable item.
6. Create a customer-service log. This will enable you to monitor and clarify what steps have been taken in response to a problem.
7. Provide an escalation policy, and make sure your customer-service representatives understand that any customer can speak with the president of the company.
8. Create a feedback mechanism to gauge the effectiveness of your customer-service center, including human contact, Web sites and FAQs.
9. Have staff rotate though customer service. This will increase their--and your--sensitivity to customer problems and expectations.
10. And last--but not least--always be courteous!

For more on customer service, check out "Giving Top Notch Support" at Solution Provider University. Features editor Al Senia and contributing editor Wayne Spivak offer tips on bettering your client's business experience.