Providing customer service costs money. Providing good customer service takes commitment and money. Money to hire the right people, commitment to provide a good level of service and learn from what your customers are telling you, and more money to actually do something about it.

What does indifferent customer support cost? While it doesn’t hit your bottom line today it’s going to have an impact when the customer doesn’t come back or shares a negative opinion and you lose business.

I know how tough it can be to provide good service. I spent some time running a support team for a software company as well as making sure we had support in place for premium services on some web properties. In every case there was a cost associated with creating service levels that made the customer feel you were on their side, and a cost associated with resolving the issue (sometimes engineering costs, sometimes time, sometimes smiling and giving a refund and hoping we’d do better next time) – from this I learned a simple lesson.

I learned that you don’t treat support as a necessary evil, you treat it as a pre-sales and marketing exercise and you focus on making happy people who are more likely to engage with you and your brand again. If you focus on getting them off the phone as quickly as possible with as little fuss as possible then you’ve already lost the battle.

As technology improves providing good service shouldn’t be hard. Companies like Starbucks, Comcast, HP and Polar all have multiple ways to talk to them – Live Chat, Twitter, Forums, Email, support systems like FogBugz – all of which allow tracking and continuity of engagement and potentially very public resolutions.

How they approach the task is very different and varies from ignoring negative comments and promoting positive ones through to active outreach and open communication. Sadly though even where individuals do a good job the process and attitude of the company lets them down (I’m looking at you HP – does it really take weeks to find out you don’t know how to change the assignments of buttons on a PC you make?!)

With a current issue with another company they have been great. Lots of communication and I’m sure we’ll resolve the issue and I’ll say nice things about them in the future.

The opportunity cost to HP of providing ineffective support is that I bought a new Acer machine at the weekend for home, so for want of a simple software fix they lost at least one machine.

I still have a stack of my official business cards but I wanted something a little different to try and explain what I do as an evangelist.

I was thinking about using one of the Blue Monster images that Hugh MacLeod (Gaping Void) and Steve Clayton have done such a good job of unleashing on the world but while I love the message (“Microsoft - Change the world or go home”) I wanted something a little different.

Hugh talks about these conversation pieces as social objects so I felt it was important to find an image and a message that summed up how I feel about what I do.

Microsoft has some amazing job titles. But at the end of the day a title is a label that can be used to pigeon hole you and how people perceive your role and function. Sure, waving the Senior or Technical parts of the title, or the descriptive blurb that defines your role in 3 words can be useful in some situations, most of the time what I do is is evangelize. So my card just say “Evangelist”

One of my first presentation courses (besides pointing out you never learn anything by showing a Powerpoint) pointed out that I have two ears and only one mouth and in any conversation that’s the ratio I should use them in. Over the years I’ve also learnt that while you can sell someone something that’s not what they need you’ll have a much better relationship if you help them find what they need. Sometimes you’ll sell them something. Sometimes you’ll help them find a different solution. Sometimes you’ll help them realize they didn’t understand the problem. Whatever the outcome I want them to feel they can trust Microsoft a little bit more than they did before (and then do my best to make sure they continue to have that experience).

I’m not sure if the dinosaur and meteor metaphor is always right – I don’t want people I talk to thinking that I feel they are doomed – but I want to make sure whoever I talk to I’m helping them find the right solution. In the case of the dinosaur it was evolution.

A big “thank you” to Hugh for a great image that really appealed to me.