Isn’t the best customer service – no customer service at all?

After a fun break-out debating session at the 2010 Institute of Customer Service conference with the argument ‘Is Customer Service more important than price?”, I got thinking deeper. Customer service (in my mind) is providing supporting services to existing customers, in other words people who have already bought a product.

The product maybe itself be a service, such as a haircut, however the Customer Service supports that product when things go wrong (- complain and get a free bottle of shampoo).  The product bought has a problem of some kind, and the customer simply needs some extra assistance to get things working.

Clearly the problem should not have occurred in the first place (in an ideal world), or more realistically – solutions should be either automatic, self-evident, or at least very easy to find.

I guess the point of this post is simply:  If product quality is greater, the cost of customer support will be less.

I suspect that companies that have the foresight (and deep pockets) to improving quality before releasing new products to market, will reap the rewards with higher profit margins (lower support costs) later on.