Ted Waitt banished the technical-support policies on his return as chief executive in late January. The company credits the changes as having spiked customer satisfaction, which hit a two-year low at the end of 2000.
A Gateway survey showed customer satisfaction up 9 percentage points in the first month the new policies were in place, according to the company.
Roger Kay, an IDC analyst, noted that Gateway must keep working on customer satisfaction because it is an increasingly important factor driving sales among repeat buyers in the United States.
"Brand loyalty is pretty poor in the PC industry in general," he said. "But within that, Gateway had been at the top of that pile of brand recognition, repeat buying and so on. They need to keep satisfaction high, so people won't buy someplace else."
Possibly topping the list of stupid policies that Gateway nixed was one related to its warranty. Until the change, Gateway would invalidate the warranty if customers installed any third-party software on their machines. Gateway also decided to do away with the policy of rewarding technical-support representatives based on how quickly they handled calls.
Ironically, some customer service people had trouble keeping calls short because of the amount of time needed to explain why installing software had invalidated customers' warranties, according to the company.
Gateway has internally been referring to the one-time policies as misguided or "stupid," said Mike Ritter, director of Gateway consumer product marketing.
Ritter acknowledged that the warranty policy probably outraged customers more than anything else. "That's where I heard the most feedback," he said. Since the changes, Ritter noted, "through customer emails I hear things like, 'I feel like I'm getting support again like you used to do.'"
ARS analyst Toni Duboise learned about the warranty policy when the company told analysts in late February that it had been abolished. Duboise "couldn't believe" that Gateway had the policy in the first place. "To see how bad things had become was quite shocking," she said.
But Duboise also asserts Gateway can turn around customer satisfaction--and quickly.
"I have absolutely no doubt that (by)...abolishing those policies, Gateway's satisfaction levels will come back up," she said. "They're going back to what they know, and they're good at it."
