Horia has a very good question in my previous post about the poor customer service of Astral, the Romanian ISP (and btw RDS, the other big player, is no better) and about the reason of it not taking care of the customer satisfaction. I believe that the answer diserves a post of its own.
It is very simple actually: customers are not among the operational priorities in industries that are in the early days of their development cycle.
These days such companies (and banks are in the same boat for example) are more preoccupied with expansion plans taking advantage of the increasing demand side. But in this case the demand is rather a function of the lack of the service (it's a virgin market) than a sophisticated set of needs the companies are trying to meet. Hence the costs of making the existing customer base happy are way higher than the costs of acquiring new ones. Plus that once you have the customers locked in (as it's still an ISP duopoly - RDS and Astral are racing head-to-head for country coverage) it's easier to give them the illusion of a better service.
When the market demand pace will somewhat stabilize and it will be in the few percentage range (or not increase at all) the companies will look for strategies such as stealing market share from one another, hence customer satisfaction will become a competitive advantage and they'll hopefully have to consider it.
Right now though they're after building infrastructure and economies of scale (i.e. as much nationwide coverage as possible). Still, besides that, at this moment they are competing on price and features, for example on the home user base RDS's value proposition differentiates only in terms of free-minute numbers VOIP solution bundled with the internet service. The internet offer is structured only in terms of bandwidth (which is still VERY expensive) once you crossed your surfing quota. But that will change soon, it is a fact though that while they may care (or may not is my opinion) about the customer satisfaction the present strategic agenda is different apparently.
Perhaps this is what makes the difference between a good and a great company after all.
I am under the impression that the notion of customer care doesn't have an equivalent in Romanian language or in Romanians heads. Customers tend to be someone that happens to be a human that pays for whatever someone called that a service. Romanian companies don't have a Customer Care/Service department. From the front desk to the GM's secretary they treat a potential/customer like s...t. When you try to manifest your dissatisfaction with their service, and remind them that they won't exist without your money they look at you like you just had an alien baby popping out your stomach...Someone said that Romanians don't understand until you push them around a bit, and that is because of the history�Rubbish someone said�Well, I am sorry to confirm that all Customer Care departments (management, pre-sales, and after-sales, service, you name it) work on the hydraulics principle: the customer needs to apply pressure for the mechanism to function. You need to come down on the person at the desk in full swing to get the job done. And that cost the customer a lot of energy (negative energy), time, and ultimately money, which he ought to deduct from the invoice he received...Try to do that....If he had a shred of energy left he will try to find another provider�but the story is the same. Unfortunately business principles function all over the globe. It is a globalized economy: customer care sells, customer care provides reputation, and reputation provides future sales�.therefore the country with the highest level of service will sell�the other will get the thumb down.