By Kenny Love

(Beats a vacuum cleaner...hands down)

Riddle me this: In today's business environment, what does the average vacuum cleaner have in common with the average customer service representative? :-) I'm betting you already have the smart-aleck answer, but save it for the end of this article.

Besides target marketing your product or service to the right audience, customer service is probably the most important aspect of your business. If you do not believe so, simply perform a test by ignoring your existing customer's requests and desires.

Your immediate wake-up call, albeit too late, will come in the form of irate complaints and a gradual loss of interest in your product or service. Another dead give-away is your competitor's sudden over-friendly attitudes and over-abundance of smiles. At this point, something should feel awry.

I recently became Marketing Director for an area Internet Service Provider. The organization is in the process of upgrading its servers, peripheral equipment, and leased lines. At the minimum, this represents a significant amount of sales commissions. We placed equipment bids with several, supposedly, reputable outstanding services, only to have 20+ pages returned via fax, e-mail responses the size of Mount Rushmore, or worse, no response at all.

Interestingly, the failure to return repeated telephone calls appears to be the common denominator among most services. Likewise, I have also experienced the same type of incidents online, on several different occasions.

While it is true that in today's world most people are, indeed, super-busy, this is absolutely no excuse for a lack of good customer service. A customer will endure many things to an extent; product unavailability, equipment failures, etc. However, a lack of attentive professional customer service does not rank among them.

As a customer, we feel that our organization has been more than patient with these companies' service representatives for several weeks. It now appears that our only alternative is to contact upper-level supervisors and report the ineptness on the part of the service reps.

However forthcoming a response is in the near future, this experience has left a less than positive first impression with us as we now sit in the customer's seat. It also causes us to question any future services that we will encounter.

By the way, remember the riddle at the beginning of this article? The Answer: "They both suck."

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