The Technology-Service Tradeoff-

On my way to school each day, I usually listen to a 30 minute snippet of the Clark Howard Show. For those of you unaware of who Clark Howard is, he's a financial expert that deals with personal finance and essentially wants to be the source of knowledge for questions from his listeners. Some people like him, some people don't, but he's not the story behind this blog. Rather, I want to take something that he refers to all the time, which is what he calls "Customer No-Service".

For him, customer service representatives are the axis of evil. They are there simply to rip you off and not help you with your problem. This got me thinking about the trade-off in such a system. When you buy something or need help, technology is great, but what really makes or breaks the experience is the person on the other side of the phone or computer.

My personal example of this is with my iPhone. As I've said in a past blog, I'm a Mac user, and I've also been an iPhone user for about a year. Things started out really well with my phone. It worked great, 3G connections were fast, and calls were high quality, especially compared to my old phone, which didn't have capability for e-mail or the Internet.

However, over the past three months, technology in the phone has come back to bite itself. I'm sure most of you are aware of AT&T's struggles to keep iPhone service at such a high level. They can only install more infrastructure at a certain rate, and the number of users on their 3G network is outrunning their installation pace. As a result, speed on the phones is way down from where it was a year ago, despite the fact that I live in an area that is much less densely populated than I did when I bought it.

This brings me back to the technology-service trade-off. When I talk to AT&T, telling them that I'm consistently losing 3G coverage altogether, and I can no longer get coverage at home, their answer is that there's nothing they could do. When I bought the phone and service plan, I wasn't signing an agreement that they'd offer 3G coverage at a 100% coverage rate, even in areas that they covered at the time. I essentially paid for the technology at the cost of the capabilities of that technology.

That doesn't make sense, but that's not how we've created customer service for technology in this country. Selling products comes first, and even though the products may actually lose value and cause harm to their own technological infrastructure, adding a new user is more important than maintaining the current user. The economics behind that are questionable, but that's how manufacturers of new technology work here.

Something will have to change, or those companies will start to fail, as customers that theoretically cost less to keep than those being recruited from other places leave altogether.