Why is Good Customer Service So Important

Jim Cuoco,
CTO, Support Fusion, Inc.

It amazes me that in this day and age how some companies still do not understand the importance of good customer service. It seems many are focused more on saving money and less on keeping customers happy. Customer satisfaction leads to continued business, referrals, and customer loyality. Inadequate customer service does the exact opposite and ends up being an enormous burden on a company, which in the end will cost more in future sales and lost customers than what would have been saved in reducing support costs.

Here is a perfect example. About six months ago I switched my telephone service over to a popular Voice-Over-IP provider. The savings for my family was be about $50 a month and with the explosion of cell phones, we have become less and less dependent on our home service anyway.

It started out great, the representative that helped with the setup was terrific and the service worked just fine. A couple of months later I ran into a problem and the only way the company allowed me to contact customer service was by calling their technical support line. Personally I would rather email my issue to the company because I like putting things in writing. There is less chance for confusion and it leaves a paper trail of what the problem was and the steps taken to resolve it.

Anyway, my call was transferred overseas to the company's support center. The representative was very fluent in English, but his accent was so thick I often had to ask him repeat himself. The real problem was not the accent though, it was his complete inability to help me with my problem. I would state the problem and the actions I took to try to correct it. He would then state what I needed to do, even though I had already done it. It was if he was just reading from a troubleshooting manual and not interacting with me at all. It was incredibly frustrating, so I ended the call and tried again with another rep. Same result. This happened on three separate calls and there was obviously a pattern.

After that experience, I got online and searched the Internet for other people's experiences with this company (something I should have done before I switched). I was amazing at how many people had taken the time to write about how bad this company's customer support was. I couldn't believe it.

After this ordeal I decided to cancel my service with this company. When I called to do it, the woman I dealt with (from the United States) was incredibly gracious. She asked why I wanted to cancel and tried to convince me to stay. I told her that if I had dealt with someone like her initially I would have stayed regardless of the problems I encountered, but I stated her company's customer service was so bad, there was no way I could continue doing business with them or recommend them to anyone else.

It is really too bad, this company's technology is absolutely terrific, but technology alone does not make a great company. The company I switched to was also a VoIP provider and while their technology is not as good, their customer service makes up for it. Problems don't happen often, but they do happen and the company that can make those problems the least painful are tops in my book.

Jim Cuoco

Email: jcuoco@supportfusion.com
Comany: Support Fusion Inc.
Blog: supportfusion.blogspot.com

More than Just a Help Desk Solution

Jim Cuoco,
CTO, Support Fusion, Inc.

The Help Desk/Customer Service market is enormous. There are an endless amount of businesses, towns, schools, and non-profit organizations that currently do not, but could benefit from such a solution. Why aren't more of these entities doing something in this area? Confusion, fear, too busy? For whatever reason, there are many systems on the market today that try to help people solve this common problem, "How do I better serve my customers without breaking the bank?"

Support Fusion's solution is different from the rest for several reasons:

First, our system is completely modular, profile-based, and is put together with dynamic data driven menus. This means that you can set up the system in a way that suits you best. Rename, reorder, remove, and/or add menu items. These items can be pages that come with the system, links to other systems, or links to documents in or outside of the system. This makes our system more than just a standard help desk, it makes it the central source of information for your business. Not only can you collect contact, issue, activity, and asset information, but you can point to anywhere locally or on the Internet to other sources of information. Why bounce in and out of several systems when you can access everything from one central location from anywhere in the world.

Second, our system is very secure. Again the system is profile-based and each profile is assigned a security level. These security levels come into play when trying to access to specific pages, which relate to specific functionality, reports, news items, and issues themselves. No item in the system has hardcoded security levels, meaning you can reassign security levels to your preference on any of these items. In the end, this means you can control exactly what people are allowed to see and if they tried to access a page higher than their security level, they could not.

Third, our Flex-Report Writer. This report writer allows you to tap into any part of our database, plus you can write reports to tap into your databases as well. By simply changing the ConnectionString of the report, you can see data from other databases while logged into our system.

Fourth and most important, our customer service is the best. We help our customers navigate through any issues they may encounter. And it does not take days or hours for us to get back to you. It is usually within minutes.

Jim Cuoco

Email: jcuoco@supportfusion.com
Comany: Support Fusion Inc.
Blog: supportfusion.blogspot.com