Face Time Does Not Scale

Corporate IT is all about service. If you hold an IT job, your job is to provide a service to someone. No one gets around it, least the senior management whose job is mostly to serve the clients' senior managers AND their own shareholders.

Everybody wants to serve well when their own face is at stake. Bad service is almost always anonymous in some respect: an email from a customer service address, an unknown voice in the support line, an invoice from the phone company. 

There is one rule here: The more customers pay, the more personal service they want, and the more they will usually get. If you buy a Windows Vista licence with your laptop, you probably won't get Steve Ballmer to personally answer to your printer troubles. But if Dell buys and preinstalls millions of Vistas, and they have a huge pain in their ass from it, they will raise the question to Mr. Ballmer and he will answer.

As much as we like good personal service, there is a flipside. Production of highly personal service does not scale. It does not scale because people have only 24 hours in a day. As a result, there is a rigid hierarchy and rationing in personal services. As a private citizen and consumer, each of us gets face time primarily from the lower ranks of any organization. And the less we pay, the less personal this service tends to be. This is simple economics of rationing human attention.

But as anyone who has worked in service business knows, there is a huge loophole here. That is, bad customers take a disproportionate amount of resources from a service company. Usually by being a nagging customer, you get more and better quality time. For free. Bad customers take advantage of people's desire to keep a good reputation. They won't use anonymous customer service channels but take direct contact. And it is damn hard to say no to them.

But that is exactly what needs to be said. Sooner or later. The only way to deal with a hard customer is to intentionally decrease the level of service. Otherwise you'll have to decrease the service level of the other customers. I don't think there is a general recipe on how you should actually deal with a bad customer, but I do know one thing. If your manager ignores your complaints about a bugging customer, then it is your manager's fault. Service managers just have to know the amount of service their organization provides to each customer and what the company is getting out of it.

It is always sad to realize that a customer has abused your goodwill. Many times these problem customers just vanish when the issue is taken seriously. If the very people that you have paid the most attention just go away, it means that they really didn't want the service. Not for the full price. But not all hard customers are intentionally jerks, they just might be clueless. The really hard problem in human relations is to take a stand when things are not black and white, which they seldom are.

-mika-