Customer Satisfaction = Stock Price?

Who doesn't hate lame tech support?  As consumers, we all suffer at the hands of price-cutting in customer service, but as business people, we at least understand the bottom-line motive behind moving your customer service overseas and installing labyrinthine phone trees that persuade 90% of your callers to retreat to your website or hang up in despair.  Sure it's mean of companies, but it's a tough world out there in the global village, and we've all gotta cut corners if we're going to return value to our shareholders.

Or do we?  Gadget man David Pogue writes in his column today that:

In J.D. Power and Associates' new book, 'SATISFACTION: How Every Great Company Listens to the Voice of the Customer,' they've been able to directly link changes in customer satisfaction to changes in stock prices...

Pogue himself recently drew the ire of Dell Computers' p.r. department when he published a friend's humorous retelling of a painful experience trying to call Dell's online support.  Besides adding more tar to their own image (who really feels sorry for a company's p.r. department when they shrilly compain that "those customers are not being fair to us"?), Dell also may be sinking their own stock price, if they really aren't delivering customer satisfaction on the phone.

Pogue informs us that:

Dell's stock price has slipped significantly over the past year. The [J.D. Powers] authors warn that Dell's situation is very similar to GM in the 80's, and that the company must refocus its attention on its customers or face a similar exodus of a once loyal customer base.

Beware cost-cutting on the customer experience!!

-David Rogers