My friend Nissan Ratzlav-Katz starting blogging about customer service in Israel and how tolerant many of us have become to sub-standard and even really crappy customer service.
An objection I’ve heard frequently to Google Apps is that they don’t give customer service – although I would argue that great products delivered that work on a global scale for free definitely qualify as great customer service.
How do startups make customer service scale into awesomeness? touches on many good points including a I Love/I Hate Ratio (Virgin Atlantic scores at the bottom – Microsoft is about even and Amazon, Google score at around 8 – meaning that 8x as many people love Google as hate them. Which is pretty impressive I thought.
Still – one thing we miss is the synergy between love/hate and suppliers and customers. If you give great service, customers will love you and if you’re a great customer and pay on time – suppliers will love you.
The only counter-example I know is Israeli corporate customers that will pay the best supplier in the world Net 180 days and take a 20% discount just because they felt like it.
Bottom line – Israel may be a country with a poor service ethic but it’s also a country with a poor payment on time ethic and poor data security, customer privacy ethic
In my book – not an accident.  If you treat your customers and suppliers well, you will tend to treat the issues of data security and customer privacy accordingly.