The number one reason why compaines loose market share

Many companies grow to the point that they loose focus on why the founder created the business in the first place. I seriously doubt that any successful business founder began with the vision of making his living by providing below average service and support, but that seems to be what happens when a company implements policies which are numbers driven.

We spent the past week dealing with such a company. It actually took about 18 phone calls and countless cell phone minutes opening call tickets for our outage only to have them closed due to an area wide outage. (One ticket was actually closed because I failed to answer the phone. Keep in mind we did not have phone service which is why the call ticket was opened in the first place) When the area wide outage was corrected, there was no open ticket for our service, so I had to call again to have another ticket generated to address my outage. Now keep in mind that if I had not called again and again, we would have never had our service restored. There is a serious lack of customer service in all this.

I spent over 20 years in the technology industry and during the course of my career found myself dealing with some of the best support organizations in the world. It is unfortunate that many of the practices that made them so great are a thing of the past. 15 years ago, if you had a business that relied on telephone or internet service, you could count on receiving a call, on your cell phone, notifying you of an outage. The technician on the other end of the line was genuinely concerned for the loss of business and the outage was treated as a high priority issue. You could count on the technician taking ownership of the problem and he or she would not close the call until you told them you were back up and running.

This was the mark of support excellence that I have built my business on. We are a supplier, but first and foremost we are a service provider. The second we loose sight of that, we may as well roll up our rug and go home.

No matter what it is you do, always keep in mind that you are first a service provider, and the rest will fall into place.

Bill Griffith
BayouSome.com, Inc.