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Seattle Times: a look at some of the best and worst in customer service

Today in the Seattle Times, Charles Bermant writes about the best and worst in customer service. He writes…



“… that some companies actually know how to respond electronically. And those who do so might not be the ones you would expect.”


Specifically, he describes his experience with his mobile operator as well as a friend’s experience with Shop-Vac…



“We have, however, examples of the best and worst. Ironically, this round finds a consumer-level garage appliance beating the pants off a major cellular provider.


I’m not surprised.


Some of the best customer service, I’ve found, comes in the seemingly lowest-of-tech companies and services… such as great hotels (where the best use the latest technology to know as much about their customer’s needs as they do to prepare their detailed bills with any number of arcane charges and taxes), popular restaurants and successful retail stores.


But I see that same spirit across many of the product groups at Microsoft, too. Whether it’s one of the staff in a product team with a popular blog or a group managing an early adopter programme on Connect, many employees and groups go out of their way to help customers and partners. Many groups run their efforts like their own businesses, meeting with customers to better understand their needs, working along side customers as they deploy and use products, and providing applicable feedback (often in one to many forums, as lots of people will run into the same issues).    


Entrepreneur magazine has an article that looks at the best customer service ideas from (way back) 1999, ones that are truly timeless…



  1. Hire The Right People.

  2. Make Service A Core Value.

  3. Empower Front-Line Employees.

  4. Solicit And Use Feedback.

  5. Pick The Right Customers.

Continues the article…


“Perhaps your first move, Berry says, should be to institute a formal measurement system to calculate the true costs of mediocre service. “If business owners take the time to properly measure the revenue lost to customers who left due to poor service and the extra costs involved in reperforming a service that wasn’t performed properly the first time, the number they come up with will be so large, it will never again be an issue as to whether service quality is important in their company,” promises Berry. “It’s instant religion.”


Food for thought.

Also of interest, Inc. Magazine’s Best Customer-Service Practices, a collection of links to interesting and helpful articles.

Tags: Customer service, customer feedback

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InsideMicrosoft speculates on a drop in the street prices on the Xbox 360 in the States

Of interest… the InsideMicrosoft blog news channel says that there’s drop coming in the street prices on the Xbox 360…



“Leaks are coming at the rate of several a day that an Xbox 360 price drop is imminent, sometime in the next ten days. A Circuit City ad shows that you should be able to get an Xbox 360 Premium, the most common version of the system, for $350, fifty bucks less than now, starting August 12. A Core system, without a hard drive, will go for $280, a drop of $20, and the big hard drive’d Elite will drop thirty to $450. The Premium comes with a free copy of Rockstar’s Table Tennis (which rocks).”


Hmmm… should be an interesting Holiday season. Perhaps with more interesting stories to come aroun Xbox 360 and HD DVD.


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Your questions: Is KB 933360 a required Windows update for Daylight Saving Time and Time Zones?

Willy had a question today…



“A customer got this e-mail about DST 2007 update – http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933360/en-us, which supersedes and replaces update KB931836, released in January 2007. Is this a mandatory update?”


It depends. This is an update for those customers who need the update for the added and revised countries (new time zone rules for Jordan and New Zealand, for example), replacing update KB 931836.


Per the KB… “Customers who have already deployed update KB 931836 should evaluate whether any of the five specific time zone changes that are addressed in the update described by this KB article merit deploying this update immediately. If systems are not directly affected, you can schedule deployment at the next available opportunity. We recommend that all customers standardize on the most current Windows cumulative time zone update to guarantee the consistency of the time zone database on all systems.”

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HBR on Companies and the Customers Who Hate Them

A quick note and a thanks to the folks for the fwd of this article from Harvard Business Online on “Companies and the Customers Who Hate Them,” an excerpt from the Harvard Business Review article by Gail McGovern and Youngme Moon…



“The Idea: A company’s most profitable customers may be those who make the worst purchasing decisions. Consider retail banking. Depending on the minimum balance consumers agree to keep in their accounts, banks set particular interest rates and fees. If a customer’s balance falls below the minimum, he pays penalties. If it climbs well above the minimum, he’s stuck with a low interest rate. Either way, the bank wins; the customer loses.




“Sometimes all it takes to trigger a mass defection from a company-centric firm is the appearance of a customer-friendly competitor—one that puts customer satisfaction and transparency first.




“Example: Virgin Mobile USA offers a pay-as-you-go pricing plan with no hidden fees, no time-of-day restrictions, no contracts, and straightforward, reasonable rates. It has nearly five million subscribers and a customer churn rate well below the industry average. Customer satisfaction hovers in the 90th percentile. And more than two-thirds of customers reported recommending Virgin to friends and family.”


If you are in a position to work with and listen to customers, what are you doing to provide greater value to your customers?


The full article is available here.

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Of interest: ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley talked with Satya Nadella about Windows Live Search

Of interest: ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley spoke with Satya Nadella, in charge of the Search & Advertising Platform Group, in her post today What’s next on Microsoft’s search agenda? …



“Nadella, who was named as the head of Microsoft’s combined Search and Ad Platform Group in March 2007, also is shepherding his team through a planned fall Search update, as well as an upcoming Spring search refresh. Nadella said his goal is to do a major search refresh twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall, for the foreseeable future. In between these updates, Microsoft will continue to roll out incremental search improvements, such as the new facial-detection search functionality it recently added to its Live Image Search.


“Nadella said the areas where Microsoft can innovate in search fall into three primary buckets:



1. Core: Microsoft will improve search relevance — not just by tweaking the search algorithm, but also by tuning the data platform and mining, he said. “We believe we can compete with anyone on relevance,” Nadella said.



2. User Experience: Microsoft has 55 million searchers. (Google has twice that many, according to Nadella.) The question is “how to get searchers to search more with us,” Nadella said. Promotions like the give-aways by the Live Search Club are hardly the only strategy Microsoft has up its sleeve here.


3. Integration: Microsoft also is working to integrate its search results, search application-programming interfaces (APIs) and search engine into existing Microsoft properties. This means everything from integrating Local Search with Microsoft Outlook, to making Live Search the engine that powers Office Live, Nadella said. “We have a set of APIs today that you can take, and (you can) use our search results with any other property or application,” he said.”


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