Your Annual Customer Health Checkup Is Overdue. You Just Don't Know It.

By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA

On the surface, the following question appears easy for VARs and ISVs to answer: How satisfied are your merchants with your customer service?

The answer is … you only know what they’ve told you. And because they’re polite like most of us, you likely have a blind spot to their actual feelings and could be at risk of losing them to a competitor.

I state that with confidence because I’ve been working with VAR and ISV executives who have been surprised what their merchants have told them through the RSPA’s Customer Health Checkup survey. As evidence to support my claim, here are some actual survey responses from merchants. You might want to sit down and take a Tylenol – things could get a little bumpy:

• It is frustrating at times to deal with you. We have been lucky recently in terms of everything more or less working reliably, but when there are issues it takes forever to resolve them.
• Emergency service (thankfully I don’t have to use it often) nights and weekends, is often provided by a staff member who is not fully conversant with [name of software redacted].