Companies offer mediocre customer service at their own peril.

A recent survey of 2,048 adults conducted by Harris Interactive indicated that 96 percent of Americans had had a bad customer service experience in the previous year. In terms of broad, anecdotal statistics, that's pretty much everybody. But it's just minor annoyance these customers are experiencing, isn't it? Just how bad is this bad customer service?

Forty percent of respondents indicated they would rather go to the dentist than experience a bad customer service session. (If this were an audio commentary, I'd cue the sound of an old-fashioned, low-speed dentist's drill right now.) That's bad. Additionally, 80 percent of respondents said they had stopped doing business with an organization because of a poor customer service experience.

Yet many companies continue to blithely offer the kind of slap-dash customer service and BPO processes that arise from trying to do it themselves. The Home Depot model may be great for yard work or re-grouting the bathroom tile, but when a company's very existence is on the line because of bad customer service, doing it yourself doesn't cut it.

The usage rates of outsourced customer care have waxed and waned over the years. When many companies fall on leaner times, the first thing many of these organizations do is try to "save money" by bringing their call center and BPO functions in-house. This, of course, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and loss of customers is blamed on that initial business downturn, not the free-fall in the quality of customer service that results when these processes are taken out of professional hands and put into the hands of amateurs who do not count quality customer service provision and back-office efficiency as their core competencies.

During times of hardship, companies ought to be outsourcing more, and not less, to services providers. The kinds of efficiencies due to economies of scale, quality boosts and increased upsell and cross-sell skills that come from handing more processes to professionals is akin to the mysterious results that occur when you increase the amount taken out of your gross paycheck for your 401k plan and it actually boosts the amount of your take-home pay.

Otherwise, you're sending your customers out for unnecessary dental work ... without novocaine.

The author may be contacted at [e-mail].

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions