Microsoft’s Danger Zone-Customer Support.

Absence of Customer support executives to inter act has been a sore point with Google’s Nexus One.This cpould very well affect sales figures.
MSFT do well to avoid this pitfall.
Microsoft is expected to introduce a phone under its own brand soon. If it does, company executives would do well to study Google’s foray into mobile hardware: Without real people offering customer support, things can turn ugly fast.

Google ( GOOG – news – people ) has been under heavy criticism for failing to have customer support representatives who can troubleshoot hardware issues for its new Android-powered Nexus One smart phone. Its support forum is brimming with questions about the device, and outlets like Twitter are flooded with frustrated comments. “Customer Service for the Nexus One basically does not exist!” writes one user in Google’s Nexus One forum. “I’m talking about a live person who understands the Nexus One hardware and Android system.
Analysts expect Microsoft ( MSFT – news – people ) to debut its phone at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress in February or at the Wireless Association’s Las Vegas CTIA trade show in March. The new phone appears to be prepped for use on Microsoft’s Danger platform, which powers T-Mobile’s Sidekick devices. The hard knocks from Google’s Nexus One experience are likely a good indicator of what might happen if Microsoft doesn’t cast a wide net for customer support.

David Vap, chief solutions officer at RightNow, one of the largest customer support software companies, says that supporting consumer hardware is much different from supporting business technologies, an area in which Microsoft already has a well-developed support system. “A new phone is going to have a lot of different demands than the printer that sits in the office,” he says.

For sophisticated smartphones, Vap says companies need to have two avenues of customer support. One is an informal customer-to-customer support channels like Google’s support forums, where users can answer each other’s questions and offer up useful tips or advice.

The other is a formal support environment. Without one, says Vap, customers likely will turn to whatever other soapboxes they have on hand, like public Facebook and Twitter messages. “A consumer needs to self-serve, plus they need a vehicle to escalate to a human for problems they can’t solve in a self-serve capacity,” he says. “If Google had come out and said here’s the environment, here’s where you go, and every single person was invited to participcate, it would be a total differnet story than it is right now.”
http://www.forbes.cm/2010/01/22/google-nexus-one-technology-cio-network-microsoft.html?partner=alerts