My dad was a funny guy. If a product served him well, it became a “good brand ” and that was that. He had a refrigerator that provided a particularly long lifespan once; as a result, every appliance he put in the house for the next 40 years was a GE. Every phone was AT&T, every hand tool was a Craftsman. Subsequent purchases were allowed to be “a bad one ” every now and then; I don’t think I ever once saw his loyalty shaken. It was formed right there during the initial positive experience. What I didn’t realize is I’ve started to become just like him.

I’ve owned every brand of laptop in the last 15 years (yes, I’m RSR’s holdout PC). But a great experience with a Compaq Presario many years back has made me a loyal HP buyer ever since. What did I like? Not only did it perform well during its lifetime, but when it came time to die, it died gracefully. It gave me subtle hints it was going, and I was able to buy another one before panic and frustration set in (as had happened with so many competitors’ machines prior). Since then, I’ve bought a printer, one more laptop for myself, and one for my mom. Without even knowing it, I’ve become an HP guy.

Now it’s time to buy a new one, and I need a feature that most new PCs don’t have: a FireWire port (or a PCMCIA slot to add one). Problem is, this isn’t listed among the features/specs of most notebooks, so after a few calls to local stores to find out what they had, the consensus response was to ask the manufacturer directly. I did. It was a fairly simple question to their sales question email address: “I’m a loyal customer. I want to buy one of your new laptops, can you please provide me with a list of which ones you currently make that would have a FireWire port or a slot for a PCMCIA card? ” Within minutes I received an automated email saying that I’d be hearing from a person soon, and not to reply. It’s a nice automated feature letting me know I’d been heard and would soon have an answer. The problem is that 3 days later when the “person ” got back to me, he said he understood my concerns, and would like to know the model and serial number of the computer I was having issue with. He then recommended that I reply directly to him should I have further questions.

You can guess what happened next. I replied to the person – same 2 emails back word-for-word. The third time I used an exclamation point or two and changed my language a bit to hopefully get picked up by a customer service overseer. I believe I used the words, “Silly… trying to BUY something new from you, not fix something I already own… Can you please just provide me a list? ” No dice. Same response from the same “person. “

Now I’m not fuming mad about this. Not at all. In fact, at RSR, we make a conscious effort not to use this newsletter to air our shopping grievances whenever they happen. But I feel this short story is worth telling – not because I’m bashing a particular retailer or manufacturer, but because it is emblematic of a larger problem.

Brand loyalty is an irrational thing. For all I know there was nothing special about that initial Compaq – it may well have just been tipping point in time when all laptop computers become more stable. Maybe the next Dell bought wouldn’t have surprised me with “the blue screen of death ” either. In fact, maybe these things all share 90% of the exact same parts and just fly under different banners. But here’s the thing: I wasn’t gonna risk it. Like many of you, I rely on my computer more than I’d like to; I’m on this thing all day every day. So when it was time to buy a new computer, I wasn’t willing to even look at another manufacturer. I’d made an emotional connection to a brand. I trusted it, and that was that; I’d found my lifelong “good brand ” and as a seller, you can’t buy that kind of loyalty.

So while brand loyalty moves down through the generations, one primary concern is that customer service doesn’t get the chance it deserves to do the same.

But what makes this slightly more frustrating is that this should be the easy part. Making a laptop is hard. Making it perform well is hard. Shipping it around the world to get it in front of the consumer in a timely and price-friendly fashion is hard. Shouldn’t answering a buying question be the easy part?

And that’s the larger question. I don’t expect manufacturers (or retailers) to stop outsourcing their customer service. But I do expect them to recognize that if you offer a feature to buyers, you best be damn sure it works the way consumers will use it. My hunch (I may be wrong) is that no one at HP has tried to use their “sales question email line ” for something like this; either way, I cannot think of a more clear-cut argument for all sellers to consider a chief customer experience officer. It’s difficult to know how your problem-solving offerings are working across all of your channels if no one is constantly using them the way a consumer would.