Two Service Stories That Say A Lot About Where The Future Of Competitive Advantage Resides

Unless you get your service right you will never grow your organisation into a sustainable business. Below we outline two real life examples to demonstrate what we mean.

Service Example 1

Picture The Scene. A 15 year old boy in the middle of an online Xbox 360 computer game when his system develops the Red Ring Of Death (for the uninitiated, this is a known hardware fault that means when these particular red lights come on the machine is unusable without serious repair).

Microsoft has known about this problem for some time spending/costing a rumoured $1billion in sorting it out. The current position is they offer an extended warranty repair (after the usual 12 months) free of charge.

Going back to the now completely frustrated boy who wants to know how quickly and cheaply he can get his Xbox back. He logs into the appropriate Microsoft site, fills in an on-line form, prints off a UPS package label, logs onto the UPS site arranges for the Xbox to be picked up and waits. The site says allow 2-3 weeks which in game-time as long as a world-wide recession, but hey what’s the alternative, some scary looking You Tube fixes involving hot towels or taped pennies (I kid you not). It doesn’t look good when he notices the returns label will send the Xbox to Germany.

The next day it’s picked up on a Thursday, nothing will happen he deduces until Monday earliest. Sure enough Monday he gets an email saying it has arrived in Germany and invites him to track his repairs progress on-line, which he does. Tuesday’s update says it’s repaired and on the way home! Tracking to the channel and into the UK it arrives in his hands Friday – 8 days after leaving, 9 days after the Red Ring of Death appeared. Microsoft even threw in a free 1 month subscription to Xbox live for his inconvenience.

This is pretty impressive (putting aside the original design fault issue). No call centre hell, no argument about cost (the console was 9 months over the 12 month warranty date), and no process or system failure, just seamless service delivery that exceeded everybody’s expectations.  

Service Example 2

The Dell XPS 1330 notebook computer has a known problem. The Nvidia graphics card doesn’t work too well (it overheats) with the standard motherboard. The result is you lose all screen functionality making (somewhat expensive) computer useless.

What to do? Use another computer to research on-line and find many other people with the same problem, even down to screen shots of exactly the same mess that is on the faulty machine. Go to the Dell website, enter the Service Tag and find the machine is out of warranty  by 3 weeks (don’t be cynical), find the contact number and get yourself ready for entering call centre hell.

What happens? After going through some over the phone diagnostics to make sure the fault was as described, the operative suggested an engineer come out next day and fix the machine free of charge. That is exactly what happened. Within 48 hrs of the problem occurring the machine was fixed, right first time free of charge, with a follow up call making sure everything was OK. Again, impressive, again ignoring the original design fault.

What do these two examples show us? Firstly, with social networking capabilities you cannot hide problems with your product or service. Secondly, with fast maturing markets you need to have a life-time customer perspective. If you don’t give customers right first time service you will lose their life-time spend and because of web communications you will lose a lot more referrals as well.  Thirdly, technology used well enables you to deliver seamless service, with no errors in a low cost way.

SalesPathways can help with your Service strategy as well as Sales strategy.  For an informal conversation contact:

Claudine McClean
T:  01789 734400
E:  claudinem@salespathways.com

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