DIYbanter - View Single Post - Workshop In An Alternate Homepower Environment

Cliff (in ) said:

| On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 14:19:28 -0500, "Morris Dovey"
| wrote:
|
||| None of that would give any hint of what actually failed in the
||| field and flooded out the end customer or anything similar.
||| For that you'd need to know what went wrong, not just
||| how to make it cheaper.
||
|| Of course. Did the paragraphs following the one you quoted make it
|| to your server? If not:
|
| They made it but did not seem to be on that issue.
| Perhaps you had to be there?

Oops. Sorry, I may have assumed too much. Customer service call center
operators take calls from customers (and sometimes from dealers) when
there's either a problem or a how-to issue. Maytag's call center had
several hundred people and these operators seemed to have been more
knowledgable than I'd expected, given the number of products and
models supported.

Cost seemed to be a secondary consideration to these people. Their
mission (/their/ mission if not the corporation's) was to resolve any
issues to the satisfaction of the customer. If/when they thought the
issue was a consequence of design, even if the use was unusual, they
weren't bashful about letting the R&D group know about it. I think
part of their motivation was "Golden Rule" and part of it was workload
reduction (fewer future service calls for the same problem). Although
I didn't have a lot of contact with CS, I'm aware that even when the
problem was something the customer had done wrong (there actually
/are/ people who'll put a half box of detergent in with a single load
of clothes!) they tried to make a follow-up call sometime /after/
problem resolution to verify satisfaction.

CS isn't a cost reducing function. More usually it adds cost - since
they provide the information leading to engineering changes for
released products. I'm not aware of any instance where their input
ever led to making the product cheaper. I suppose it could happen, but
I didn't see it.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/solar.html