Introduction
George Santayana said “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” While it seems pretty innocent to bring a customer into the service area to show them a problem or issue that you are working on for them; there are a number of reasons why you should not. A couple of personal accounts of
mistakes I’ve made may help underscore some of these reasons.
Top Five Reasons Why Not to Bring Customers into the Service Area:
Theft
While it is hard to believe that any of your customers would ‘borrow’ anything from a restricted area, the reality is that every year corporations lose millions of dollars to ‘shrinkage’. ‘Shrinkage’ is a polite word for theft and while employees are screened prior to hire, customers are not. By not allowing customers into the service area, it reduces the number of people that have access to property that does not belong to them. In a place that I used to work a computer sat unused for a number of months. The time came to deploy that system and it would not power on. The diagnosis: Someone had removed the processor and memory. Was it an employee or customer that had removed the parts and was it for legitimate reasons? We’ll never know.
Customer Injury
While the display areas of most offices and stores are neat and tidy, the same cannot be said for the private areas and storage rooms. Test labs have cables running everywhere, break/fix benches have parts, and other hazards that can easily lead to an accident whereby your customer could be injured. This presents a large potential for liability and could cost you lots of money.
System Damage
What if your customer bumps a server, knocks a box of screws into an open machine, leans on a keyboard and deletes critical files? If this person is a customer, will you be able to charge them for the damage done or will your company have to absorb that cost? What if the system damaged is not your own but another customer’s? This now extends the cost of the accident to another customer which you certainly can’t bill for the damage to their system while in your care.
Customer Privacy
This is a big one. This can extend from the very simple to matters of utmost security. What if two of your customers are competitors and information gleaned from a service area visit gives one customer an unfair advantage over another. This is not only unfair but has legal ramifications that could cost the company money from a privacy legislation violation. The other end of the spectrum is embarrassment for the customer and potentially the employee. Early in my career I was doing break fix on a system for a university student when one of my coworkers was giving a tour of the tech area to a family (father, mother and small children). When the system booted for the first time, I noticed a “viewer discretion is advised” image as the background on the monitor. I quickly reached for the power on the monitor but it was too late, the family had seen the image and was quite shocked and I was quite embarrassed by the situation.
Corporate Confidential Information
In service areas there is always corporate confidential information that should not be shared with customers. What if your service board details a serious bug or flaw in your systems that could cause loss of customer faith, even if you have found and corrected this issue? What if a customer sees a cost sheet that details your cost and profit margin and leverages this information to negotiate a better price? What if one of your service people decide to say something inappropriate as a customer enters the service area? These are just a few of the many reasons to protect corporate information in service areas. Most employees in service areas are less than cautious with this information in service areas because they are not supposed to be the domain of customers. The time my boss brought a client into the service area to show them the meticulous build process and the client saw the cost sheet for the system broken out into line items could have cost the company lots of money if the customer had felt we were charging an unfair margin.
Conclusion
While the majority of these reasons were written from the perspective of a hardware company, these all apply to the software world as well and in some cases, the reason has greater meaning in the software world. What if a company lost its intellectual property due to customers being in restricted areas? This simple incident could spell financial ruin for the company.
If it is necessary to show your customers something, have an area or meeting room where you can easily hook up their system, your system or other device that you wish to show the customer and prevent these problems from happening to you.
It may seem like these incidents would never happen but, three of the five have happened to me. If they haven’t happened to you yet, learn from my mistakes and feel good about being able to say “I’ve never had that happen”.
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