Masked opportunities

It is not my intention to transform this blog into a political platform but I just wanted to share yesterday's experience with you.

There are, as you probably know, some very influential bloggers out there with very large audiences. Sneezers I believe Seth Godin calls them as just a few well chosen words can spread an ideavirus faster than the speed of light.

Yesterday, one of them noticed a blog by someone called the Masked Blogger, who wrote about his company. Apple.

Now Apple has a strict no-blog policy and so MB's comments stirred up quite a commotion. So much so that Dell's PR machine jumped straight in and posted a beatifully-worded declaration of how it alone was changing the face of customer support.

Why am I posting this here? Because I wanted to share with you an article that quotes Mr Accolla, Acer EMEA's Vice Chariman, and Acer's changing attitude towards customer support.

This is Accolla's part of the article:

Acer’s service levels have come under strong criticism from the channel over the past couple of years, however, at the global conference Acer revealed that it had made a significant investment in improving customer satisfaction.

Emanuele Accolla, Acer EMEA vice-president, admitted: “Our average repair time was very bad 18 months ago. We had a crisis and couldn’t provide the necessary support, but we have since put in a huge amount of investment to rectify this.”

Acer now has 15 direct repair centres in EMEA that can handle up to 5,000 repairs a day. It also has six direct call centres manned by 250 employees who can handle 18,000 calls a day; one spare parts hub with 150 employees and structured web site support that can handle 40,000 downloads a day.

“We care about customer satisfaction,” Accolla said. “We have in place a directly owned customer service structure to serve our customers. We interact directly with our customers on after-sale support for a better understanding of their needs.”

Acer has implemented a customer satisfaction rating system with a score of one being unsatisfactory and five being very satisfied.

“We were a score of three on average 18 months ago and now we are more than four,” Accolla claimed. “More than 900 completed customer satisfaction interviews a month are carried out to obtain these figures.”

Acer said its average repair turnaround time is now four days; its average call centre response is 80 per cent and the average response with no delay is 50 per cent.

“Our goal is that four out of five customers are given an answer to a problem within a couple of minutes,” Accolla said.

Basically the problem of customer support exists across the board. No manufacturer or vendor can escape the risk of product malfunction. They're all trying to address the problem and Acer is no exception.

Even the most well-oiled system is going to squeek every now and then but don't let that discourage you. Should you ever have a problem with an Acer product, give your local Acer customer support a ring and see for yourselves if Accolla was right.