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Customers Question Tech Industry's Takeover Spree
crimeandpunishment writes:
"When it comes to the world's largest technology companies, is bigger better? Maybe for the companies, but maybe not for their customers. Tech companies, which have spent $350 billion buying other companies over the past few years, have marketed their acquisitions as beneficial for their customers, offering them a broader range of products, and making it easier for one-stop shopping. But changes in customer service may be offsetting any benefit. In the words of the chief information officer for a large association, 'When the smaller guys are gobbled up by bigger guys, in theory it's supposed to be better, but in our experience it's been worse.'"
This past week I had two very interesting customer service experiences -- interesting because of just how different they were.
I spent probably 5 to 7 hours on the phone with HP technical support last week, trying to get them to assist me with a problem we were having with a pair of ProLiant servers. I was shuffled around to multiple departments (and, judging by the various accents, I would say I was probably shuffled to multiple continents as well), each one telling me that the next guy was the right guy to talk to about our issue (which of course he wasn't). This was for a fairly simple question about the functionality of one of their server administration tools, that no one seemed equipped to answer.
Conversely, we also had a hard disk in a ProLiant server go bad. With the serial and part numbers in hand, I was able to get a replacement shipped within 10 minutes.
The two completely different experiences I had suggests to me that when companies get large, they get very good at handling the common support problems, like bad hard disks. They develop procedures that save both the company and the customer lots of time, and are relatively painless. But what's lost is the ability to handle the out-of-the-ordinary service needs that customers have; the company is just too big, and the support guy (let's be frank, in some call center in India*) just doesn't have the resources or the knowledge to handle the problem. This leads to a frustrating experience -- whereas in a small company, these things tend to be handled quickly, because the support guy can escalate easily.
*HP doesn't even try to hide that their support is outsourced to India. If you log-on to their professional support, you can tell right away by the names.
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The company gives you a paycheck because without you (and their other employees of course), they wouldn't be in business very long.
They certainly don't pay you because they WANT to. They'd be much happier keeping their money if they could convince you to work for free. Salaries are a huge portion of most companies' costs.
Same with customers. Apple doesn't make iPods because they benefit you. They make iPods because you're willing to buy them (maybe not you specifically, but the more general "you're") and Apple gets money for it. If no one was willing to pay for an iPod, Apple certainly wouldn't continue making them. And flipping the coin, Apple would be quite as happy to sell you a rotten banana peel as they are to sell you an iPod. Apple only "cares" about what you in the sense that you won't give them money for things that you don't want. Caring about the customer is NOT an intrinsic property of a business, its a requirement for that business to be able to make money in a capitalist society where consumers have the option of not buying.
Even monopoly companies have to "care" about their customers in the sense of providing something of utility. A monopoly on rotten banana peels isn't going to generate a lot of income. Even without the option of purchasing from a competitor, the option of not buying at all is still available to consumers.
At least for most products. These arguments break down in the face of "necessary" products such as electricity, running water, food, etc. Now food isn't so bad because you generally have the option of multiple suppliers, and competition keeps things fair. No such competition exists for things like electricity and water (at least in most cities). For those products, you can neither decide to purchase from a competitor nor decide not to purchase at all. As an off-topic rant, this is the reason why I consider "privatizing" these sort of products to be a terribly bad idea -- all of the monopoly power of a public utility with none of the public oversight. Pretty much bad for everyone except the new CEO and whoever he paid off to make it happen.