Customer satisfaction: ‘Make it right’

We think the economic downtown will yield a silver lining: better customer service.

Here’s a case in point out of Microsoft a few years back:

Kevin Johnson had a long history of lighting up Microsoft with improvements in customer service. At a sales meeting in New Orleans in 2003, Johnson showed videos of respected staffers telling stories of how they’d been thwarted from helping customers. Johnson announced a “Make It Right Fund” of unlimited resources to solve customer problems.

While his customer-service fund cost the company up to $40 million a year, his division’s revenue surged by a whopping $11 billion. And customer satisfaction rose to an all-time high.

— Adapted from “Star Power: Kevin Johnson, Microsoft,” David Kirkpatrick, Fortune.