(Updated… a lot)
Recently I’ve seen signs that may suggest the occasional UPS glitches are not-so-occasional, and there may be deeper systematic problems with our favorite delivery service.   The brown truck driver is as friendly as he ever was - it’s the systems that appear to s***w customers left and right.

First there was the unreasonable delay within California, then the case of the “lost” packages, a systems failure compounded by rude customer service:

• Four out of five packages I dropped off at the same UPS store disappeared - i.e. they were never entered in UPS’s tracking system.
• Since the system is always right, customer service accused me of never having shipped them in the first place, then of not applying the labels properly.
• When the recipient, Shoebuy.com, a major UPS customer initiated a trace, the previously non-existent packages miraculously all showed up at the destination UPS center, without any indication how they got there.

The above example may not be rare, as demonstrated by this commenter:

Texas-to-Texas package disappeared (was never scanned in) and 30 hours later showed up in Alabama.  UPS has no clue how it got there.

Finally, my third shipping experience within a month:  I’m expecting a Sony Reader sent from NY to CA.  It was originally due to arrive on 7/28 but now I see it’d rescheduled for 7/29.  A one-day delay is not the end of the world, until you look at the details:

-The package arrived at Vernon, CA Thursday, 7/24.

-Next arrival scan is in Los Angeles, Friday 7/25 evening. (Great progress!)

Now, I don’t know why it sat a full day virtually in the same place, but even with this delay, if it’s in Los Angeles on Friday, why on Earth can I not receive it on Monday in the San Francisco Bay Area?   Why the Tuesday delivery?  That’s 5 days within California!

Admittedly my statistical sample is rather small, but 3 failures out of 3 deliveries within a months suggests these may not have been accidents, UPS may just have more serious logistic / system problems than they care to admit.

Update: Rob’s story below is so shocking, anything I’ve experienced pails in comparison.  You just HAVE to read it in full.

Update #2: On second thought, it’s a story worth bringing it up to here in full:

I’ve got one for you….

My sister-in-law has MS and receives very expensive injections delivered once a month, packed in dry ice because it has to stay refrigerated.

My sister-in-law lives with her mother. Well, her mother had decided to cancel her Dish Network subscription. Dish told her to put all of the hardware in a box and they would pay to ship it back to them via UPS. Only problem was, there was no hardware to return since she had already done that through the retail store. Dish claims that they notified UPS to cancel the pick-up…given the rest of this debacle, I’m inclined to agree with them.

Meanwhile, my sister-in-law gets her medication delivered via FedEx (because there’s no way UPS could get it there in time before the ice pack failed). FedEx leaves the package containing the medication on the front porch.

Now, UPS shows up a little bit later and TAKES THE WRONG PACKAGE. Apparently, the instruction to cancel the pickup never made it to the driver. The package they took was clearly in a FedEx box, with FedEx shipping labels, etc. There were no UPS shipping labels anywhere. UPS essentially stole her medications right off of their porch.

You would think, given their commercials about “delivery intercept”…you know, “there’s a problem with the gizmos” that it would be a simple matter to stop the package and turn it around….NOPE. Their advice was to call FedEx (what the *&!@^ does FedEx have to do with it and to call the pharmacy to get a replacement). They said that it was en route to Dish Network and they couldn’t stop it, but that Dish could send it back (which Dish would have to pay for…how is it Dish’s problem?). The problem, which was explained to them, is that by the time all that happens, the medications will have reached ambient temperatures and will be useless and that my sister’s insurance wont pay for the $1500 meds twice in one month.

They eventually rectified the situation by reimbursing my sister the money, but only after she paid out of pocket to get the replacements and after spending countless hours on the phone with UPS customer service.

What can Brown do for you? I don’t know, but I know what I’d like to do to brown….

Update (7/29): Today is the rescheduled delivery date.  The latest scan info shows yesterday my package was in Sacramento, 90 miles NE of me (remember, it was coming from LA, South!).  I smell another re-schedule

Update (7/29 evening): UPS just confirmed they really have no clue where the package is and recommended I contact the sender, as only they can initiate a trace.  Deja vu

Update (7/30): The sender initiated a trace and the expected delivery date field completely disappeared.  A few hours later new scan information showed up:  Out for delivery.   This means I should get it today. Hooray!  Except… the package is in Vancouver, WA, and I am in California.   If UPS keeps on randomly driving around the West Coast, they might just accidentally find me one day

Update (7/30):  I called UPS with my concern that it cannot possibly be “out for delivery” from Vancouver, WA.  They confirmed I should ignore the status, the package indeed will find my way to CA today.  Yeah, right.   A few hours later someone woke up.  Now delivery is rescheduled for the third time, adding two more days, with this status message:

This is beyond pathetic…

Related articles by Zemanta

• UPS: Tracking and Customer Service Failure
• UPS: Delays and Customer Service
• What can Brown do for you? Make right hand only turns that’s what

Tags: customer disservice, Customer Service, delivery, DHL, failure, FedEX, logistic, shipping, system failure, UPS, upssucks, usps

Perhaps it all started with Jeff Jarvis’s Dell Hell.  Simple story: famous blogger gets poor service > blogs about it > company faces media backlash > company wakes up to social media, turns around > eventually Jarvis praises them as a Cluetrain business.

Then there’s Comcast: everyone’s love-to-hate cable company that now actively monitors Twitter for customer complaints in an effort to improve both their image and customer service.  These companies know something that many others still ignore:

Times have changed. Using blogs, Twitter, social networks one single unhappy customer can make a business look really bad.  Poor service is bad PR, which is very costly to undo. Good Customer Service is great  marketing.

Now here’s my story of an online retailer that’s about to learn these rules.

My Dad has diabetes, and he likes chocolate - not a good combo. There’s hardly any choice in sugar-free chocolate, what’s available locally tastes like **** and is overpriced.   Eventually I found two (only !) online sources that sell Milka, his favorite brand.  I ended up ordering from Belgian Chocolate Online,  (www.chocolat.com,  www.chocolatesimports.com) owned buy CandyWorld, USA.   The site claims they ship the day after the order is placed, yet mine was only sent 9 days later, after I inquired.  The delay was actually reasonable, due to a heat-wave, but shouldn’t they notify customers?

But the real surprise came a week later, when I received a large box  of almost-expired chocolate.  True, it had a few weeks left, but given the economics of shipping, I bought 40 bars, i.e. 4 kilos, or close to 9 lbs.  I don’t know about you, but my Dad certainly does not eat that much in 4 weeks…

Two of my email complaints were left unanswered, so a week later, by the third email I was a bit antsy:

Dear Customer Service,
I don’t get it. Is your solution to Customer Service issues to not respond at all?   I’d like to know if you intend to replace the old product with fresh one, or send  refund.  This is my last request, if you continue to ignore me, I will pursue this on my own.

Finally they answered (emphasis mine):

Dear Customer:

We are not ignoring any emails. We are helping customers placing their orders or who really need customer’s service. We can’t help you in an expiration date problem that you do not like and which isn’t a problem.

The chocolates you bought are still not expired and we do not see why to replace or to refund. The expiration date is not the date for consumption, but a date to sell. We do NOT sell any chocolates with an expired date.

Ouch!  Who really need customer service… I’ve just spent $130 on old product and I don’t qualify for attention.  Expiration date is not a problem… although this obviously sounded baloney, I wanted confirmation, so I contacted Kraft Foods, Milka’s parent company, who responded within a day:

The product should be consumed by this date. We cannot assure freshness after that date because the taste and texture may have deteriorated.

(Side comment: talk about the power of brands … yes, Milka is a popular brand in Europe, and Milka is owned by Kraft, by can you imagine asking for Kraft Chocolate?)

Anyway, I am confirmed to be right about the expiry date, and  Belgian Chocolate Online’s attempt to explain the problem was a lie .  They were right in one point though: technically, they did not sell expired chocolate.  Not until one day before expiry … then good luck trying to eat it all quickly.  It is common practice by groceries to deep-discount perishable goods a few weeks/months before expiry, and one can even find Milka chocolate on eBay at a  fraction of the original price - but eBay sellers disclose the shortened shelf-life, for fear of eBay ruling against them in a dispute.   I guess there is no such policing on the Wild, Wild Web.

Except… now every consumer has the means to get “noisy” about their problems.  I am no Jeff Jarvis, but CandyWorld USA is no Dell, either: I wouldn’t be surprised to see this post on the first page of several relevant Google searches (see update), and believe me, that will cost them a lot more than it would have cost to keep me happy.   Of course not everyone has a moderately well-read blog, but just about anyone can make noise on Twitter, and Get Satisfaction is another great resource to vent and get service.

In fact a combination of Twitter and Get Satisfaction was what brought me Comcast help a few months ago.  The attention I received from Comcast Executives from Philadelphia and here in California was quite amazing.  Comcast is becoming a hero for listening to customers on Twitter, and others follow. Southwest Airlines now even has a Chief Twitter Officer.

Are these examples PR acts or real customers service?  The individual complaints are resolved, for the customers involved, it’s real service.  But Twitter or not, the “loud” unhappy customers are still just a fraction for now - which is why companies can afford to go out of their way to satisfy them.

I trust that simple market mechanisms will force companies -large and small- to improve service in the long run.  The economics are simple:

1. The PR damage (and potential loss of sales) caused by “noisy” individuals far exceeds the cost of helping them, so companies pull resources to put out these fires.
2. Yet firefighting is costly, may work with dozens, hundreds of customers, but not all.
3. Companies will reach a tipping point, where all the after-the-fact firefighting will become so costly, that it will actually be cheaper to train their support personnel and provide better service in the first place, thus the Twitter-heroism will decline.

We’ll all be better off after #3.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Comcast, Twitter And The Chicken (trust me, I have a point)
• Customer Service in the Age of Social Media: A Lesson from Hewlett Packard
• How to give Feedback to brands using Social Software
• This Time, a Chocolate Retailer Demonstrates Why You Cannot Botch Service in the Age of Social Media

Update: Just as exptected: a few hours later this post is on the first page if you search for Belgian Chocolate Online,  and comes up first, before the vendor if you search for sugar-free Milka, which is how I found them in the first place.

Update (9/16):  Following the trail from my blog referrer log I’ve just discovered this post is now #1 on Google for the “milka chocolate marketing” search.  Oops… that can’t be good - for Milka.

Tags: belgian chocolate, candyworld, chocolat.com, chocolate, chocolatesimports.com, comcast, customer disservice, Customer Service, diabetic chocolate, diabetic milka, getsatisfaction.com, kraft foods, marketing, milka, online candy, online chocolate, southwest airlines, sugar-free chocolate, sugar-free milka, swiss chocolate, Twitter, word-of-mouth

Image via Wikipedia

Recently I ranted about UPS’s delays and customer service level - oh, boy, little did I know then just how bad UPS Customer Service can really get.

Four out of five packages I dropped off at the same UPS store a 2 weeks ago still showed “Billing Information Received” status a week later.   In UPS lingo this means the shipping label was created, but the package was never received by the company.  There’s nothing to track, as far as UPS is concerned, the package really doesn’t exist.  This was what the Customer Service agent repeatedly told me anyway, further explaining that the only way  this could have happened if I either did not send the packages at all, or did not properly attach the labels.

Of course she did not have an explanation on how the fifth package safely arrived in the meantime - after all, I did not dropped them off at UPS according to her theory.  If it’s not in the system, it doesn’t exist. Only when I asked her if she was accusing me of lying did she change tone, and recommended we put a tracer on the lost packages. Since these were returns to ShoeBuy  using their return labels, they were considered the shipper, not me, so they had to initiate the trace.

ShoeBuy is a company with amazingly good Customer Service - since Zappos is often referred to as to epitome of Customer Service, let’s just say ShoeBuy is like Zappos, often with lower prices. They picked up my email immediately, and they probably carry some weight with UPS, since the non-existent packages were found in no time.  The tracking information below tells the whole story:

The packages never entered UPS’s tracking system, there’s no sign whatsoever that I ever sent them from California, yet they miraculously showed up at the destination, ready for delivery upon ShoeBuy’s inquiry.  So much for the rock-solid tracking system…I understand the first step, i.e  a UPS store clerk forgetting to scan the received packages, which then got loaded on the truck anyway, but how were  4 packages then able to bypass all further stages of scanning?

But let’s finish this post on a positive note: it’s a story of good Customer Service, after all - just not by UPS.  ShoeBuy, upon finding what happened, immediately refunded my money, before they even received the packages from UPS.  Wow!  They know something about keeping customers happy.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Does UPS Have Deep Systematic Problems?
• UPS: Delays and Customer Service

Tags: customer disservice, Customer Service, shoebuy, tracking, UPS, upssucks, zappos

I’m expecting a package that was due for delivery today. Here’s the UPS tracking info:

Let me get this straight: the package was here in California, 42 miles from my home yesterday at 8am.  Apparently the train was late, but who cares, it was here yesterday morning, will sure make to my place today?  Nope, a day later it’s still in San Pablo and it’s being rescheduled for delivery tomorrow.

Today it will make it all the way to the UPS center in San Ramon, a 30-mile trip, and just 12 miles from my house. Then tomorrow afternoon it will finally get here - 42 miles in 3 days.

Now, I can already hear the arguments about logistics optimization.  My package may just have missed the early morning pick-up and that was the last one for the day.  But isn’t timely delivery, and consequently customer satisfaction worth scheduling an additional pick-up in case a train is late?

It gets worse.  In this case UPS simply did not go the extra mile to make up for the train delay.  But I’ve seen cases when the package arrived to San Ramon a day earlier than scheduled, yet it did not make it on the truck the next morning.  UPS would rather store it an extra day at their facility than deliver a day early.   Forget customer satisfaction, this is all about market segmentation and protection.  They will have to make sure a 7-day delivery is indeed 7 days and not any faster, otherwise they might just reduce their customers’ inclination to pay for faster delivery methods.

Update (7/1): Oh, boy, when I wrote this, I had no clue just how bad UPS Customer Service can really get…

Related articles by Zemanta

• UPS: Tracking and Customer Service Failure
• Does UPS Have Deep Systematic Problems?

Tags: customer satisfaction, Customer Service, package delivery, UPS

Oh, TechMeme has its ways of creating some fun… On the left are the odes of how Holy Apple changed the entire wireless industry.  The untold story.   Too bad it got juxtaposed with the much less cheerful story of a customer being denied warranty for having downloaded a custom ringtone. 

Tags: Apple, Customer Service, iPhone

Jeff Nolan rants about his bad experience with Frontier and United Airlines. Nothing new there, we all have our own horror stories. (My “favorite” one is the Christmas flight to Los Cabos, which was supposed to be a 3-hour quickie and became a day-and-a-half nightmare by way of Phoenix, airport motel..etc, courtesy of Alaska Airlines.)

The reason why this rant is quote-worthy is that Jeff moves on, and comes up with some creative ideas to improve customer service.

This led me to highlight a couple of things I could wish to inflict on United:

1) United CEO Glenn Tilton has to give up his private jet and fly around the country on scheduled flights in the last row of the airplane, next to the lavatory.

2) United’s top 500 executives will get dispersed around the country to different airports for the week between Christmas and New Year’s to work the baggage handler, mechanic, cleaning crew, customer service, gate agent, and flight attendant jobs. Everyone works a new job each day until they rotate through all of them.

3) United’s top 500 executives have to greet passengers in the terminal at O’Hare, Denver, SFO, and Dulles airports one day a week until their customer service ranking moves from last to the top 3.

4) Lastly, and this one is serious, Tilton and the other execs have to personally call 5 customers a day to apologize for their shitty airline.

I love these ideas, and seriously, they would work. If United Management cared to improve service, that is…

Tags: air travel, airlines, alaska, customer disservice, Customer Service, frontier, united

Just two weeks ago Technorati was praised left and right for “returning to their roots”: reinstating charts and the authority filter in search. The most telling title: Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts.

Today they are back. To irrelevance.

When I first noticed I could not find posts older than 6 months, I had doubts if I tested enough, and even if I did, was the issue system-wide, and “by design” or just a glitch. Then I got confirmation from Technorati’s Ian Kallen:

We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling that have required taking some data offline. The data is not lost but our priorities are to prefer keeping recent data online. Most people don’t notice We’ll probably be bringing that data back online but I don’t have an ETA yet.

First of all, thank you, Ian, for responding so fast. Second, it’s a sad post comment: you just condemned Technorati to irrelevance. Your new CEO says:

The core of everything we do is in blog search - without question, we must do that very, very well

Hm… and the first step to providing quality search is to take the index offline… 6 months is not “remote past”, significant events were reported / analyzed by blogs, often better than mainstream media, and now they are nowhere to be found! Here’s the result of a search I performed for background to my next story: Technorati (0 results) and Google (83 results). I can’t use Technorati if it does not remember “yesterday”… and you don’t even have an ETA on restoring the index.

But the worst part isn’t the poor performance It’s the attitude: silently take it offline, hoping “most people don’t notice“. Yuck. In the age of transparency. I’m afraid Dennis Howlett is right:

@Ian: “We’re in the midst of some economization, performance fixes and retooling” - in other words - we’re totally messed up and are trying to figure out what to do next. That would be closer to the truth don’t you think?

Update: Any hopes of users not noticing are up in smoke: it’s on TechCrunch, TechMeme and a bunch of blogs including hyku | blog, TeleRead, Susan Mernit’s Blog, Deep Jive Interests, Data Mining, WinExtra, Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog, and The Last Podcast.

Tags: blog search, Customer Service, Google, google blog search, technorati, transparency

9 days ago, when Google shut out their video customers without proper refund, I expected the poor decision to be overturned in a day:

Boing boing is (almost) right to call it the Golden Opportunity for Class Action Lawyers. Why *almost*? Because this ignorant move is so ridiculously stupid, will hurt Google’s image so much that I’m sure someone higher up will wake up and revert it before the lawyers have a chance to file papers.

Yesterday it finally happened, Google finally reverted their position:

When your friends and well-intentioned acquaintances tell you that you’ve made a mistake, it’s good to listen. So we’d like to say thank you to everyone who wrote to let us know that we had made a mistake in the case of Google Video’s Download to Own/Rent Refund Policy vs. Common Sense.

• We’re giving a full refund - as a credit card refund - to everyone who ever bought a video. We’ll need you to make sure we have your most recent credit card information, but once we know where to send the money, you’ll get it.
• You can still keep the Google Checkout credit that you’ve received already. Think of it as an additional ‘we’re sorry we goofed’ credit.
• We’re going to continue to support playing your videos for another six months. We won’t be offering the ability to buy additional videos, but what you’ve already downloaded will remain playable on your computer.

Happy end, after all. For the users, perhaps .. .definitely not for Google, whose credibility is tarnished. Still, this was such an obvious decision to make, that I can’t help but wonder:

What took Google a week?

Needless to say, this is today’s hot subject on TechMeme, here are some of the posts: Ars Technica, Epicenter, Download Squad, eWEEK.com, InfoWorld, Insider Chatter, WebProNews, Search Engine Land, The Utility Belt, AppScout, BetaNews, NewTeeVee, TechBizMedia , Mashable!, InsideGoogle, Profy.Com, Google Blogoscoped, The Register, The Technology Chronicles, Web TV Wire, Valleywag, PC World: Techlog, TechSpot News, and Search Engine Journal

Tags: Class Action, Customer Focus, Customer Service, Google, google blunders, Google Video

Microsoft laid out its web-based strategy at their recent annual meeting with financial analysts. Pressed by first of all Google, but even smaller players like Zoho and ThinkFree, Microsoft announced they will add similar services to their Office products, first of all Word and Excel.

“We’re not moving toward a world of thin computing,” said CEO Steve Ballmer, referring to systems in which simple processing takes place on a PC, but more complex processing is moved to a centralized computer through a network connection. “We’re moving toward a world of software plus services.”

A few days later Microsoft’s half-hearted announcement (leak?) about giving away free, ad-supported versions of its baby-office, MS Works 9 sparked speculation if this would in fact turn out to be a Software plus Service offering.

Let me reveal a secret: I’ve been using Microsoft’s “software plus services” for years - long before the term was coined. Microsoft Money, the product I was forced to switch to when my bank abandoned Quicken support 7 years ago is a classic example of software plus services. The client software came with a browser-like UI, smoothly connecting online services into the basics ran on my PC. In fact switching between screens I often did not realize whether I was working offline or online. Isn’t that what “software plus services” is all about?

Money was a latecomer to the personal financial management scene, clearly dominated by Intuit’s Quicken, and in the first few years it got better and better … perhaps Microsoft’s intention was to kill Intuit after they could not buy it. When it didn’t happen, they must have lost interest - the annual Money upgrades brought less and less new features or even bug fixes, and smart users started to skip releases between upgrades. Then trouble started left and right: weird things happened to my accounts beyond my control. Categorization? I’ve long given up on it, most of my downloaded data is associated with junk categories. The real bad part: data changed in existing accounts, very old transactions downloaded again into already reconciled months..etc. This is my bank account, my money we’re talking about! The very data I meticulously took care of while in my possession now got randomly changed. The only way to be really sure I have the right balances was (is) to go and verify them at the individual bank or broker sites.

But none of this compares to the total ignorance Microsoft showed when they “upgraded” Online Banking on the 19th of July. There was no prior warning, or an option to upgrade at a later time when I logged on, I was simply notified that an upgrade *had taken place*, and that I no longer have access to my online accounts until I do a bunch of house-cleaning:

In order to update successfully, you will need to disable the existing online services for some of your accounts, set up those accounts again so that they will use the updated service, and then merge the old and new accounts.

Of course it’s not that simple, first I had to process all pending downloaded transactions, then back-up Money, then proceed with the task above. Oh, and the poison pill: merging accounts. I had the misfortune of doing it at a previous Money upgrade, and merge it didn’t… I ended up with zillions of duplicate entries to be cleaned manually. But I had no choice… I wanted to make a payment, and Microsoft locked me out of my accounts - so I started laboring away, around midnight. This time (unlike many) I was actually lucky: after about two hours, I was all set, the merges worked this time, and I was ready to make the payment - the 2-minute transaction I started 2 hours earlier.

(Update: Telling quote from a Microsoft employee:

This past weekend I got the most horrible and scary warning from Money. Just reading the instructions on how to keep using Money with Online Banking is enough to make this computer professional run screaming from my office. The instructions are 24 freaking pages!!! longer than the manual for the product. I seriously almost went to the “Add / Remove Programs” Control Panel to fix the problem.)

Now, if you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably noticed my anti-Microsoft leaning, and I don’t deny it: we all (well except Mac users) share the frustration of failed updates, the pleasure of patching the patches after Black Tuesdays - what is there to like? But none of that is comparable to a software company ignorantly cutting off their users’ access to their own money, (and I don’t mean *MS Money*) and not even feel the need to apologize. It’s the absolute Cardinal Sin. And now this company wants me to put my trust in their services?

I’d much rather trust Wesabe with my money matters - their user groups are lively, full of advice, the CEO himself participates, in fact he is taking user calls 7 days a week. The full truth is, I have not switched yet, as they lack in functionality vs. Money, but I can’t wait….

Back to the title of this post - what’s the component Microsoft does not have to offer Software plus Service? It’s Customer Focus. It’s simply not in their DNA. It will be hard to deliver *Service* when your customers don’t trust you.

Update#2: Omar Shahine, a Microsoft employee responded - it’s worth reading in full, in fact I’ve just suscribed to his blog. I’m just quoting a few excerpts:

I absolutely empathize with this post on Software + Services by Zoli. As a long time user of Microsoft Money, I am this close to outsourcing the software part to Wesabe…

Now, I don’t agree that Microsoft lacks Customer Focus. That’s saying that all 70,000 employees lack customer focus…

I certainly don’t mean to imply that all 70,000 employees lack customer focus. They may all have the best intentions, it’s the end result that counts, the company’s interaction (or lack of) with Customers, and that’s often through products.
Money issue aside, I think it we add up the time spent with bungled patches, rebuilding Outlook profiles..etc, we (computer users) ALL lost days of our lives to Microsoft.
That’s bad enough, but can mostly be attributed to unintentional technical glitches. The Money Online Update was “Crossing the Rubicon”: Somebody in Microsoft had to make a deliberate decision that it was OK to cut off customers access to their financials without first telling them, giving them options, or even apologizing after the fact. That makes the *company* blatantly ignorant - despite the best intentions of those 70K employees.

Update #3: Further evidence of Customer Focus, the Wesabe way. I suppose they did not intend to pile on, but their comments got held for moderation, so they did not see each other’s.

And in perfect timing, here’s an article on Customer service 2.0, the Zoho way. The two stories they link to are worth reading - somewhat similar to what I’ve talked about here. Beliefs are important - but in our materialistic world, there is always the “What’s in it for them?” question. Well, it *pays* to focus on your customers. It may well be Zoho’s key differentiator, why users stick with them, instead of the default Goo-rilla.
It certainly paid another company, Atlassian which grew to over $20M in revenue without a sales force. “Support is Sales for us” - they claim (PDF), and the numbers back them up.

Update (8/8): Wow, interesting timing: Today Microsoft released Microsoft Money Plus, the 2008 version of the Money products. It comes in four editions: editions: Essentials, Deluxe, Premium, and Home & Business. Well, almost. Microsoft offers a nice comparison chart, which neglects to mention a small detail, available only at the footnotes:

* Important note – Microsoft Money Essentials will not be able to open previous Money or Quicken files. If you are upgrading from a previous version of Money or Quicken, Money Plus Deluxe may be the right solution for you.

Not opening Quicken … well, it’s their decision. But not opening data from their very own previous releases? And this is hidden in the small print?

I rest my case.

Related articles by Zemanta

• SaaS or S+S? It’s over: Software+Services wins (and about Office 2.0)
• Microsoft’s Aborted Baby: the First Web-Office (Almost)
• Microsoft yanks Money off retail shelves

Tags: atlassian, Customer Focus, Customer Service, Customer support, Google, microsoft, Microsoft Money, Microsoft Works, MS Money, Online Banking, SaaS, software as a service, Software plus Service, thinkfree, Wesabe, zoho