Eric Mack recently blogged about his bad experience with IBM concerning a large purchase on behalf of one of his clients.
“Many weeks ago, I set out to order 2 rack-mount servers
and 12 high-end ThinkPad laptops from IBM. I will spare you the almost
unbelievable details, but I will simply say that it took over 100 communications
with IBM over a 6-week period to complete the order for just the first
two servers. Much to my amazement, no one that I could reach at IBM had
the "information" (to be extremely polite) to be able to assist
me in helping my client with their purchase. Calls to IBM management resulted
only in e-mail from first level sales reps being sent back. After doing
some research, I found out that I was not dealing with IBM, but an organization,
located in a Southern state, to which IBM had outsourced operations.“
His conclusion is that IBM's outsourcing to a company in the US has sharply downgraded their sales model due to lack of product knowledge at the outsourced organization.
“The problem appears to be a complete lack of information and knowledge
to complete the sale or satisfy the customer, and the unwillingness of
IBM management to get involved. The walls between the outsourced organization
and IBM are apparently quite high.“
It seems to me that not only was there a lack of product knowledge but a lack of passion, customer service and empathy which led to his frustration. IBM is doing a huge disservice to themselves by following these types of practices and it seems that the outsourced company could barely care less about the business.
The point that many of these companies forget is that in today's world these bad experiences spread like wildfire. I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there who will now think twice about buying from IBM, especially if Robert Scoble picks up a thread like this, heck, it may even become a story of Snopes-like proportions.
Even if a company has a great product the service is oftentimes what seals the deal.
I have been leaning further and further away from a certain big name electronics store here in Canada for just that reason. The prices are good, they have advertised specials every week but every time I speak to a salesperson in a store I'm left feeling that either A.) I'm being given a load of bull or B.) I'm being taken advantage of. I could not imagine going through the same thing with a big name like IBM when dealing with a $50,000 order.
How many car salesman leave customers with exactly this feeling though? The last car I bought was very painful to finally get and the dealer that went a bit further to get the EXACT model/make/color I wanted got my business. The other guys that just put up their hands and said "we're all out of that color" lost the deal right there.
I recently went through a similar process with Dell when buying a notebook for personal use. The salesperson at the mall kiosk was helpful and knowledgeable but when it came down to the nitty gritty of the technology he was lacking. I'm not knocking him for that, I don't expect that every sales guy in the mall is going to know the inner workings of Windows and can explain the real differences between XP Home and XP Pro, however the effort to learn and understand (or find out little details for me) did not seem to be there and that was frustrating.
Companies like Dell and IBM (or even car companies) need to encourage and teach their people and get them to understand not only the customer but the product, inside and out and be passionate about what they're selling. Is that too much to ask for a $10.00/hour job? Perhaps, but if these guys put forward the effort, chances are they won't be at that job for long. Maybe that's what makes people like Eric Mack, Robert Scoble and David Allen truly exceptional.
These companies need to get passionate people into Customer Support Evangelist positions and make their customers feel like humans, or else they'll just move on.