Customer service and marketing

The world of marketing continues to rely on excellent customer service regardless of all the innovative strategies, product positioning and branding or re-branding ideas that we create. Great companies have seen their demise because customer focus seem to shift away from their core business model as they grow. Dell is an excellent recent example of how customer service became an issue for both their initial growth success and later loss in revenues. Dell's initial success is attributable to a superior supply chain combined with good customer service to their customers. When off shoring of various services such as call centers to India became a competitive advantage for cost savings to many US companies, Dell took advantage. In doing so, good customer service seem to have been compromised and was evident by a decrease in company revenues. Robert Walberg reported on MSN.com that, ". . . one of Dells biggest problems has nothing to do with price. The company is losing customers to poor tech support and customer service."
My favorite experience of poor customer service is a small restaurant that I frequent with my other half for cocktails and appetizers. The cocktails and appetizers are priced well and the space is quaint and there are numerous weekly and weekend events on schedule to entice new customers. However, upon more than one occasion after going there for over two years, we continuously get bad service and no positive resolution. We speak with the owner sometimes during our visit there and they believe all is okay. I cannot believe that when lengths of time pass and we return, there are no courtesy questions such; we miss you and hope there wasn't a problem with your last visit. We've visited numerous five star restaurants and bars and we know what top tier customer service is are not demanding it at this establishment but just being good local patronizing citizens. It is beyond me sometimes for any business owners not begin to comprehend how serious customer service is essential for any business. Businessweek.com recently reported a story on Fedex's ailing Kinko's acquisition and lists poor customer service as attributing to their negative profitability.
Good customer service should continue to be top priority of any business model and especially all company goals and motto. Monitoring of customer service as a key performance indicator is a small, time or financial investment and a win-win scenario for all business whether small or large and makes good business sense in the end.