The Art of Customer Service is a recently published piece of Guy Kawasaki’s excellent “Art of…” series. In his article, he emphasizes the importance of having a great customer service and points out that…

[...]customer service has as much to do with a company’s reputation as sales, marketing, engineering, and finance.[...]

I cannot agree more. Maybe I would even call it an understatement.

Customer service can make or break a company, if the company is not in some kind of monopoly position. My previous ISP, the manufacturer of my previous MP3 player and a couple of other companies lost me for their ignorant and bureaucratic customer
service. I would not hesitate a second to switch my cable TV or telephone provider if there were alternatives, thanks to their poor customer service. On the other hand, I cannot stop recommending products of companies which gave me great customer service experience (well, provided the product works). Surprisingly, a few companies still have not realized that it is always the service sold, even though the product itself is an MP3 player or a software tool.

1. Comment by Mike aka Sagan
   posted on April 13th, 2006 @ 12:10 am GMT+0000
   

   Definately, and your’s is one of the reason I recommend ORF to my peers. :) I also just ran into this where I chose to pay extra for some parts via a web site just because their customer service (and this was even PRE-Sales service) was really excellent..

2. Comment by Peter
   posted on April 14th, 2006 @ 03:04 pm GMT+0000
   

   Thanks Mike :) We always tried to pay attention to our customer support and it is great to receive positive feedback on our efforts.