During the past two years, Hewlett-Packard has been able to hold steady, at one million a month, the number of customer phone calls it gets, even though total requests for help have exploded. During that same stretch, the number of downloads by customers seeking a piece of software or instruction manual, for example, has jumped to 10 million a month from one million. Companies that aren't taking advantage of the Internet are missing an opportunity to satisfy their customers. We recently called HP's customer support line to find out how to get a piece of printer software we had misplaced. We needed it quickly, so we paid for overnight shipping.
New technologies can greatly enhance companies' interactions with customers on-line.
Yet few big companies have yet taken advantage of the ability to interact more intimately with customers. The main exceptions are on-line retailers, which know they have to answer customer questions well enough to ensure that people buy something right then rather than wait or move on to another Web site. The barriers to switching retailers are gone. He says retailers have a long way to go and need to be more creative. While companies used to be able to gloss over customer-service problems, confident that customers couldn't do much to their reputations, that isn't true anymore.