When customers attack!

Physician heal thyself. It's amusing to note that Siebel - the market leader in customer relationship management - has somehow managed to come bottom in a study looking at hi-tech online customer service.

I did find it strange a few weeks ago to hear the company's new CEO argue that one of the things it needed to do going forward was to focus better and more closely on the customer - which, as I said at the time, I was rather under the impression was the Siebel raison d'etre anyway...

Of course it does make for a nice headline that a CRM champion should come bottom in the survey, but the wider issue of how well the entire hi-tech industry does with customer service and support is a bigger story.

It's interesting that another firm that makes bold claims to CRM success - Oracle - also comes close to the bottom of the pile.

On the other hand, companies with commodity products such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer emerge in glory. There is clearly a world of difference between providing customer support for a printer ("Have you plugged it in?") and trying to offer online service for an enterprise deployment of CRM applications!

But the fact remains that some companies are culturally more geared up to being closer and more helpful towards their customers than others. As a hack, one of the most constant demands I place on marketing and PR people is to be given live customers to talk to. Those are the people on the real front line, the people who really know what the vendors are like and how they perform.

It's also typically the thing that most companies singularly fail to deliver. There is the market leading CRM firm that cannot produce a single customer in the UK who is willing to speak. The applications firm with an RFID practice that cannot produce a single RFID customer worldwide with 2 months notice. The firm that boasts of the importance of analytics software going forward but is seemingly unable to data mine its own installed base to find a customer who'll testify to this.

It's notable that the smaller firms or the start-ups tend to be the most willing to risk letting their customers out to play. Once you get beyond a certain size and installed base, the customers turn out to be a double-edged sword - really useful if they stick to the agreed messaging; a pain in the butt if they decide to air a few grievances in public.

But listening to what the customer is saying is the only way to understand what's really happening. Vendor A can claim to be the leading provider of a synchronous, end-to-end, value-added, fully buzzword compliant piece of software, but if the punters can't get through on the helpline and reckon that customer service is a crock of the proverbial, then that's the real story...

I'd be interested to hear any war stories from you about what level of customer service/support you're getting from your vendors. Send your comments in to me. We'll keep your identities anonymous so you can comment without fear on that count, but it would fascinating to get a picture of which vendors do well... and which do not!

If you are happy to post using you name, you can click the 'Add your own comment' below to share your thoughts and opinions.

Stuart Lauchlan
News & Analysis Editor
stuart.lauchlan@btinternet.com