Why big companies customer support sucks
Published February 21st, 2007 in AttitudeA couple of days ago Joel Spolsky wrote a very nice article about customer support in a small software development company. Once again it’s nicely written and has a lot of smart points. But what I want to talk about today is not the article itself but an interesting observation based on it and other related articles.
The observation is small companies pay more attention to customer support than big ones.
Why is it so? What prevents big corporations from providing remarkable customer service? I think there’s a number of reasons.
- Too many people. Big company has many employees. It’s difficult to find or train one good customer service specialist. It’s much more difficult to repeat it several times and create a good customer service department.
- Lack of motivation. In a small company everybody is passionate about product success as their personal success heavily depends on it. It’s not so in a big corporation where most people are just tiny wheels of a complex mechanism they don’t really understand and their salaries rarely depend on their performance.
- Wrong attitude towards support. Big companies tend to think that customer support is an ineviatble evil and the only thing you can do about it is to cut corners. Small companies understand the importance of customer satisfaction.
- Too much money. Big companies have much money. They can lose a client or two or even a dozen and still be just fine. Understanding that leads to problems. Fortunately enough small companies usually don’t have much money.
- Owners are not involved. In a small business founders usually are involved in every aspect of business operation. It’s not so for corporations which are usually owned by other corporations or stock holders who know little about the business specifics and never pay attention to details.
The list above is by no means complete. But it gives a rough understanding of what happens and why. Are there any means to improve the situation with customer support in big companies? I hope so.
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Hi Serge,
I manage a Help Desk for a mid-size mortgage lender. The problem I have is that there is far too much knowledge to attain to create a comprehensive service team. My team’s area of focus is our origination website. There is a world or knowledge for the agents to learn just about this but they also must learn about mortgage industry terms and processes. The problem comes when there isn’t any other direct customer service group until we are servicing the loan for the consumer. We have sales people and operations employees as the general customer service contacts and they frequently refer back to my group.
#1 - Managers have to be focussed and driven to find the right people. The challenge for me was to realize that I am running my own small business and to focus on that. Not always that easy but it makes me feel more responsible
#2 - Again this points to management. The problem I see is too many people have more than a full plate and some small gears here and there slip out. Noting to break the whole machine but efficiency is affected.
#3 - I do see this. The push has been in every area except dedicating a highly trained group to customer service so that operations employees can do their jobs without interruption.
#4 - This is a bad industry for this point. If you don’t generate loans for the lender you are not seen. The boom caused many people to get a broker’s license and just do a loan here and there to supplement their income. They don’t get the same service and the big brokerages.
#5 - It’s all about shareholder ROI - especially now that things are slowing in this industry. I see an opportunity to re-invest the gains made during the boom time back into technology and people and make major strides in market share. This is happening where I work but I don’t have a high enough understanding to feel if we are being overly cautious.