Cost of good customer service can ALWAYS be offset by eliminating waste. There’s not a business out there that isn’t crippled to some degree by wastefulness. Eliminate the waste and you can pay for anything.

Biggest waste? Junk for executives. Two thousand dollar office chairs. Forty-inch flat panel displays for their top-of-the-line computers used only to send e-mails. Stuff like that. You clean house on that bloat and you can pay for anything. Just eliminating departmental one-upmanship would go a long way to justifying better customer service. When you’ve got two departments trying to outdo each other on who can buy the most worthless junk, you can watch a lot of money fly out the window for bupkis.

As soon as we are willing to pay more for the better service, then we’ll get it. Unfortunately, the concept of “lower prices, better value” has brain-washed us. We want more for less, and what we get is less for less. Sure, prices have dropped, but so has the quality and value of what we get. I used to work for a company that provided technical support to BellSouth DSL customers. The company moved the call centers to the Phillipines because BellSouth was not willing to pay for the cost of the service from American shores. They told us to our face: “You’re the best in the business, but we can’t afford you.” And then laid us all off.

On a balance sheet, customer service is an expense, and is balanced by the asset of Goodwill. The less we pay for customer service, the less the goodwill. But customers also have a role to play, by realizing that customer service costs money, and someone has to pay for it.

Welcome back, though!