I've written about good customer service in the past, highlighting my excellent experience with L.L. Bean. I've postulated that quality customer service is actually free, because the incremental sales more than make up for "excessive" talk time and refunds/credits granted by your customer service representatives. Here's a trivially-observed example of what lousy customer service will cost you. In this example, from Verizon, it's a minimum of $100.

After lashing out at Verizon and Vonage a little while ago, I thought I'd move on to other topics. But Verizon can't help but make simple mistakes in their direct mail efforts.  On Friday, I received yet another first-class mailing, this time promoting Verizon's FiOS Internet service. Since I've now been a triple-play customer for two months [...]

For the first time in a long time I took a few minutes to run through the Valpak co-op mailing I received last week. After a few minutes of looking at the offers, I came up with a short list of things to consider if you're using Valpak (or other co-ops) as a marketing channel.  The [...]