My column ("Grading Quality") in last month's issue drew a near-record amount of reader mail. Most of the letters
agreed with my position that the state of quality is terrible. I've argued many times in this column that although senior management is primarily responsible for poor quality,
it's consumers' responsibility to communicate their displeasure with poor quality. Apathy and resignation in the face of poor quality do little to promote its improvement. However, just as I
argued last month that quality has declined in the last five years, so too have the opportunities to voice frustration with poor quality products and service. Nowhere is this
more evident than the Internet. Along with the rise in e-commerce has come a dramatic drop in customer service levels. In a traditional brick-and-mortar retail environment, the customer and the
vendor deal face-to-face. E-tailers, however, have shockingly low levels of customer interface and therefore shockingly low levels of customer service. For example, a new trend
with software companies is to force their customers to go to a Web site and purchase pay-by-the-minute or single-incident support before calling the company with questions. (I don't
normally mention company names in this column but Network Associates—maker of McAfee Anti-Virus—is one such offender.) This is a great solution for the company, but a terrible solution for the
customer—particularly because if your software isn't working, it's likely that neither is your computer, which prevents you from going to the Web site to purchase the support.
Although many traditional companies pride themselves on answering the phone on the first ring, software companies seem to pride themselves on how many buttons they make you push before telling
you they're too busy to help you right now: "Please hold. Your call is important to us." If it's so important, why don't you answer the phone? The solution is twofold: Improve the product so you
don't have so many calls, and hire more people to answer the phone. (What, no money to hire more staff? If you have so many phone calls, you must be selling a lot of product.) Our
resident computer expert, Dirk Dusharme, often has the pleasure of dealing with technical support. One of his favorites is Cayman Systems. He has called Cayman on several occasions and has been
put on hold for three to four hours only to receive a message saying: "Our office is closed. Please call back during regular business hours." Of course, they then give him the option of leaving a
message, to which they never reply. Another Web-based company that I use refers callers to its Web site for technical assistance: "For technical support, please press two." Upon
doing so, the caller hears: "If this is a support issue, please send an e-mail to support@mycart.net." Of course, the e-mails are never answered. I decided to do a little
research into the quality methodology utilized by some of the larger dotcoms, so I looked in the Quality Digest subscriber database to see if we had any subscribers in the dotcom "industry."
Aside from a few subscribers at Amazon.com (which I've never personally had a quality problem with), there were none at any of the biggies—Yahoo, eBay, Expedia and the like. (Are you paying
attention, consultants? There are a slew of books, seminars and training days to be made.) We'll be taking an in-depth look at this topic in next month's issue. I'd like to
know what you think about dotcom quality. E-mail me at spaton@qualitydigest.com . |
