Shortly after moving to Oregon, I drove to work one day and noticed a big, ugly, annoying nail sticking out of my front tire. Great. Being from California I figured this translated into delay, inconvenience and a few bucks out of pocket. I asked a group of people where I could get it fixed. I got a spontaneous, slightly amused, group reaction: Les Schwab, they said.
As I pulled into the Les Schwab parking lot, a young man came running toward my car with a grin on his face. He asked if he could help. I explained my problem and asked when I could pick up my car. No need to leave it, he said, and went running back in. A nanosecond later he was running back out with a jack. He yanked my tire off, pulled the nail, patched the hole, washed my white-wall, slapped the tire back on, and never stopped grinning. When I asked him what I owed, he said "nothing, just buy your next set of tires from Les Schwab." I did.
Service. There's no substitute for it. Service has traditionally been an IBM strength, and with the rapid "commoditization" of hardware, service will be its future. Two recent events offer us a glimpse of that future. The first has been something of an ongoing event and by its sheer volume appears to be the solution-of-choice for the problems plaguing the beleaguered corporation. IBM recently announced its intention to reduce its work force by another 40,000 employees.
The numbers of the yearly-departed have grown unexpectedly large, like a distant nephew-a gangly youth when last seen-now grown to thyroidal excess. By my count, that's 140,000 employees over the last five years. Almost three football stadiums full. That's a lot of folks who can no longer change your tire, or respond to your technical questions. To midrange customers, already feeling the pinch of neglect, this latest announcement pushes the company beyond its stated intent of being "lean" toward corporate anorexia.
The second event is, in part, a response to customer concerns over the first. IBM, sensitive to demands for support services, has responded by packaging seven services (individually or in combination) which substitute technology for personal contact wherever possible. Six of the seven new As/400 Technical services are remotely supported via telephone, computer or electronic bulletin board. AS/400 HouseCall-customer-site access to a live technical specialist- arguably the most useful of the offerings, is also among the most expensive; $620 per fixed block of four hours.
Other services include: As/400 SupportLine-24-hour, 7-days-a-week telephone access to technical specialists for answers to questions about system use and operation. (A similar scaled-down service is available for S/36 and S/38 customers.)
AS/400 Associate-an add-on to SupportLine which, as near as I can figure, guarantees that you get to speak to the same person each time you call. Your contact becomes your "advocate" for $250 per month per machine.
AS/400 ConsultLine-puts you in touch with the AS/400 Competency Center. consultants there will grapple with the weightier issues of conversion, communications, networking and the like.
AS/400 Forum-an electronic bulletin board for exchange of ideas and software among users.
Performance Management 400-takes performance data from your system, pipes it to the Competency Center where it is massaged and returns it to the customer in the form of "easily understood historical trend analysis reports and graphs."
AS/400 Alert-provides notification of the latest PTFs.
IBM's news release indicates that these services "provide support over and above entitled services provided by the IBM systems engineer and marketing team..." For the customer, I suspect, that is precisely the dilemma: understanding exactly what services they are entitled to, what services they can depend on. One consultant working in an As/400 shop recently told me, "We've had the system for about five months, and it still isn't clear to anyone whether we should contact the business partner or IBM when problems arise."
From IBM's perspective, it is more efficient and cost-effective to centralize technical support rather than disperse it around the country. The delivery vehicle for support services then becomes technology rather than a neatly tailored blue suit. Operating system upgrades, configuration changes and performance tuning can all be done remotely, like course adjustments beamed to a distant satellite. Over time, as customer expectations change, this approach will work. But the customer-as-satellite model, while efficient, hints of deep-space abandonment. For the most part, the services now being marketed had been provided free by systems engineers not so long ago.
customers complained to IBM representatives that technical support does not seem to be available "at any price." The people simply are no longer there to provide it. That advances the notion that all 140,000 departed employees were not doing unnecessary work. While reductions in work force realize salary/benefit savings for the corporation that reflect positively on the balance sheet, reductions on this scale must also have profound effects on customer service. Customers are sending a message that downsizing acts as a flow restrictor on their support.
The internal effects of the continuing dismemberment of IBM are more subtle and may leave the corporation in a weakened position to respond to an economic upturn. Less measurable are the impacts on surviving employees. They are being asked to take up a lot of slack which creates a chronically stressed employee base. The costs are many: fatigue, neglected tasks, stillborn ideas, stress- induced medical leaves of absence, burnout. When the global economy finally cycles out of recession, will IBM be in a position to respond? Is there enough leg strength left to kick-start the IBM locomotive?
Several years ago, TV commentator John Chancellor, in a unique and in some ways extraordinary moment in broadcast journalism, sent IBM an electronic get- well card. He said IBM was a national treasure, represented much of the best in us, and it was ailing. IBM's technology and innovation, he thought, had touched and bettered virtually all of our lives and IBM's decline should consequently be a national concern. He wished the company well.
He was right. Few human institutions have been as solidly dependable as IBM. If customers and industry observers now second-guess the changing corporation, it is in part out of a sense of shared concern that the company they have known, supported with their purchases, and perhaps depend on, is drawing away from them. Customers want connection.
Technical problems are not unlike an annoying nail sticking in your tire. The manner in which that problem is fixed may well determine where you buy your next set of steel-belted radials.
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