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I'd argue that this mentality is a byproduct of the concept of a "cost center" which is itself an arbitrary and toxic concept.

• bbcbasic 12y ago
  Definitely, as if good customer support won't help future sales and increase customer retention. Without support and training software is kind of worthless.
  • exelius 12y ago
    Yeah, but the return on investment in marketing is likely much, much higher. Or, better yet, invest in making your product better so customers don't need to call support in the first place. Customer churn is also very, very hard to quantify, and your customers will leave you for a variety of reasons, many of which would not be impacted by better support (i.e. they move, go out of business, get purchased, etc.)
    • bbcbasic 12y ago
      Yes certainly, it is an illusion that marketing, customer support, product development and sales are all discrete things without any overlap.
  • zyxley 12y ago
    Heck, all you need for proof of that working is to scroll up and look at the people giving Zappos free advertisement on HN.
• jessriedel 12y ago
  The concept isn't normative and it definitely is meaningful. Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure. People know that in the limit of non-existence, the company can't survive without it, so customer support has to exist. But as long as money is used to support them with no easily measurable benefit, it will always experience strong downward pressure on operating expenses.
  • wpietri 12y ago
    All of western accounting, including the cost-reduction mindset, is artificial. It just happens to be the dominant paradigm, so many people mistake it for some sort of universal truth. If you look at the Lean Manufacturing folks, they have their own notions of accounting. They think the mantra of, "increase revenues, reduce costs" is stupid. For them, it's "increase value, reduce waste". A simple example: you make hamburgers. You find a cheaper supplier of meat. It's not quite as good, but the number of complaints is manageable. In the western perspective, that's a win: revenues are stable (in the short term, anyhow) and costs are decreased. But in the Lean perspective, you've probably fucked up: value is down and you haven't reduced systemic waste. As an example of what customer service looks like from that perspective, consider this example: http://kevinmeyer.com/blog/2008/10/jke-day-2-saishunken-cosmetics---customer-care-trumps-a-factory.html http://kevinmeyer.com/blog/2008/10/jke-day-2-saishunken-cosm...
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • Kluny 12y ago
      That was a great read, thank you.
    • digikata 12y ago
      Another topic in this vein is Throughput Accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throughput_accounting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throughput_accounting
  • kyllo 12y ago
    Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure By that metric, marketing and advertising must be cost centers! But they somehow always manage to take credit for revenue. Honestly I think that "cost centers" are a combination of politics and managerial laziness. If you only place value on the "easily measurable" benefits, then the beneficial but more difficult-to-measure functions will be devalued and cut back. And maybe a department only gets labeled a "cost center" in the first place if the manager running it is not influential or politically savvy enough to take credit for a piece of the revenue. If you can form a reasonable argument that your work either earns or saves your company more money than they're paying you, you are not a cost center, and you would be foolish to accept that label.