Reprinted with permission by The Philadelphia Inquirer The unhappy experiences of many Internet shoppers this Holiday Season can be traced to one culprit: "customer service." Those experiences illustrate the mistake many companies make in focusing so much attention on marketing customer service, that they neglect the areas necessary for delivering customer service. Because of this oversight, web shoppers merely exchanged mall shopping hassles for new Internet shopping hassles-site crashes, overloading that resulted in "cyber busy signals," items out of stock, late shipments, poor responses to the myriad questions about fouled up orders, and general confusion. Most of these are simply cyber versions of hassles found at traditional "mortar and brick" stores. But the Internet, always ready to move us into new frontiers, gave cyber shoppers a new hassle that has no mortar and brick equivalent: "denial-of-service attacks." These deluge a Web site with a tidal wave of bogus requests from angry hacker-types whose goal is to block legitimate requests from real customers. The important point, though, is that most of these problems relate to specific aspects of any retail operation, and therefore should have been precluded with a little foresight. The problem is that, with everyone talking about the importance of "customer service" and giving customers what they want, some companies neglect infrastructure issues that are critical to meeting customer needs. Take human resources, for example. Having all the shopping items in the on-line world does the customer no good, if the company doesn't have the people to pull the orders, pack them, and then ship them out. And having people to respond to complaints or answer questions, whether by toll free numbers or email, isn't sufficient if those people lack the communication skills necessary to treat customers with dignity and respect. But having been purchased on the web, those products now had to be delivered by someone. Press reports indicate that UPS, Fed Ex, and even the U.S. Postal Service were stretched to the limit by the additional, and unanticipated, workload. No wonder many shipments were late. Another infrastructure issue involves the websites themselves, many of them relatively new. Those sites require hardware and software, not to mention the financial resources to pay for them, to keep the sites up and running. They also need security to prevent hackers and angry people with an ax to grind (or a mouse to skin?) from stealing information or inflicting "denial of service attacks." The lesson from this applies not only to Internet commerce, but to all businesses, because the overriding goal is always the same: to deliver goods or services to the customer. But the emphasis on "customer service" must always include the infrastructure to get those products and services to the customer. We must always be looking at the customer, but we must never neglect the resources (human, physical, financial, proprietary) or the other critical areas, such as distribution, that enable us to provide customer service. This is true of any business, but is even more crucial when trying to innovate processes, or enter new markets.
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