Bootstrap Service Blog

When I started Bootstrap Service I did so with the idea that many younger or emerging companies were doing themselves a disservice by not making the right choices and investments in their customer service or support efforts early enough in their evolution. It’s my belief that this approach forces companies to react to customer service activity rather than being proactive and getting prepared, resulting in far less agility and much higher costs in hard dollars, poor service delivery, lower customer satisfaction, and diluted brand value.

Wanting some empirical evidence I visited the “Austin Emerging 100” site, opened up Excel, and browsed the “About Us” pages on every one of the companies listed looking for the executive staff titles. My approach was simple. Browse the “Management Team” page for each company and enter in Excel each executive title listed with a company name. I then tagged each listing with a business function (e.g. “Sales”, “Engineering”, “Service”, etc.)

The results were startling. I captured 458 executive titles out of 95 companies that were still in business from the list. Of the 458 titles, only 3 contained the word “Customer”, and only six had anything to do with service or support if I included the very few Directors and Managers listed. In fact, if I included ALL of the titles that involved professional services, field service, client implementation, etc., it was still only 5% of the total.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious. Smaller companies simply cannot afford to spend precious capital on service needs when there are few, if any, customers early in their life cycle. Yet most of them know it’s an important component of success. But it begged the question:

“If every company has a customer service or support function and only six are dedicated to customer service, who in the list of458 titles owns the rest?”

Between polls, asking those I know, calling a handful of businesses, etc., I was able to come up with the answer. They report to the “VP of Underscore”. It’s all over the map. Some report to VP of Operations, others report to the VP of Sales, the VP of Engineering, the COO, etc. Few of these folks have customer service as their core competency or discipline and they’ll continue to run things until the activity level gets above the knee caps as their customer install base grows. That’s when they and their company begin to “react” and are often at a loss as to how to put together a service strategy and implementation plan that aligns with their product success strategy. It proved my theory and Bootstrap Service continues to grow as we target businesses in need of specific service expertise without having to hire someone full time. Ask me who the ideal executive is for my sales efforts and I’ll respond with “the VP of Underscore.”

p.s. The irony is that the “About Us” and “Management Team” links are next to the “Support” links on 90% of the web sites. Go figure.