Poor Customer Service and Low R&D Investment. Where can it bring you?

For many years in the past, companies were able to prosper and grow without investing too much into customer service. Nowadays, as competition increases, and market matures, poor customer service can create financial implications for companies. Part of the problem is low value placed on customer feedback, particular complaints. But customers want to be heard. Resolution and correct management of complains in one of the major ways of retaining customer and keep them loyal to a particular company. But this is only one side of the story. By listening to your customers’ complains, you can always realize how and where products or services could be improved or further developed. Here you can identify opportunities for new products development. As an example of the company that, in my opinion, could improve its customer service, is Apple. Although, I find Apple to be innovative and successful company, the stream of complains either about the quality of iPods or dropped calls on iPhone and slow data transfer seems to increase. This can lead to some financial complications for Apple in the future, including decreasing sales or price drop for their products. Placing the price tag for Apple products high also means that the company should be able to deliver quality products and listen to their customer, who paid that high price tag in order to correct the problem and, therefore, be more competitive in the market place.

Let’s look at another indicator that company might face some strategic problems- low investment in R&D. But first let’s look at this quote: “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”- Steve Jobs, Fortune, Nov. 9, 1998. I agree with the fact that innovation is not expensive, but you surely need some money to into capabilities of people to do the job after something is invented. May be Apple is learning how to be innovative with less money? May be through more effective management of innovation? But we should not forget that nature of R&D development is changing nowadays. With the increasing competition in the technology market, it is not only about technology innovation any more but it has to do a lot with design innovation as well. Apple is on the top of industry, but to stay there, they have to remember the need to constantly increase their investment in R&D.