If you are not careful, you may succeed so much you become a marketing disaster.

Marketing is more than attracting customers and selling to them. It is also keeping them. That means marketing is also customer service. There is an inherent danger in success. A company can out-grow its good customer service, turning a marketing plus into a marketing minus. A company that once thrived by pleasing its customers can overnight become the Company from Hell when growth outstrips the willingness to treat customers right.

This is important to know for fast-growing Internet-based businesses because they have an even greater likelihood to become the Company from Hell.

A recent personal experience with a vendor underscored to me how devastating bad customer service (AKA bad marketing) can be. I had another excruciating (yet increasingly typical) experience on the telephone this week with my ISP. I was bounced from one ill-informed clerk to another, that is when I managed to get a real human being to take my call.

I endured this agony to straighten out an erroneous billing of $7.95. For about an hour I tolerated long passages of obnoxious recorded music, punctuated by short conversation with inept real people. At my hourly rate, that's $125 of my time. In effect, I spent $125 to persuade my ISP to stop improperly billing me $7.95. In hindsight, it would have been more cost effective to continue paying the over billing. They could have over-billed me for 16 months before it would have cost as much as I invested to fix the problem.

However, the real long-term cost is not to me, but to my ISP. Before I explain why, let me say I'm extremely hesitant to switch ISPs, particularly because my current provider also hosts our web site and is consistently rated among the best in customer service (imagine that). But their company has grown immensely and quickly, and probably too much of both.

Obviously, they have not hired enough people (let alone capable people) to handle the increasing volume of calls for technical assistance and billing questions. And clearly they have lost interest in providing the good customer service that built their reputation. Each time I pick up the phone to resolve a problem with my ISP, I am faced with an increasingly worse Byzantine automated telephone labyrinth that forces me to wait 20 or 30 minutes only to find out that the person I finally reach can't help at all, and that I must be transferred again. Each experience nudges me closer to switching ISPs, and transferring my web site to another host.

There's a theory that government gets away with over taxing people because it's more trouble for taxpayers to do something about it than it is to let the government continue to take their money. But at some point even the laziest taxpayers say enough is enough and shout: "Throw the scoundrels out."

I have a similar theory about businesses. They can treat customers lousy and get away with it as long as the customer thinks the solution is worse than the problem.

Today I still believe switching to another ISP is probably more trouble than it's worth, but I don't believe this nearly as passionately as I used to. I try to tell myself that if this company with its lousy customer service is ranked among the best, imagine what others must be like. Nevertheless, I'm reaching the point that this lousy customer service will push me across the pain threshold, and I'll say enough is enough and replace the scoundrels.



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