And They Told Two Friends...

By Jason Stewart - February 20, 2008

Customer Support and Marketing, Replacing Sales and Marketing as Your Dynamic Duo

I've heard it said that if you have a bad experience, you are likely to tell three people about it - but if you have a good one you might tell one person. Is it because people just like to complain? I'm not sure, but I do know that one of the things I like about Seth Godin is that he goes out of his way to acknowledge good customer service. Why does he do that in a marketing blog? Because word of mouth is the best form of marketing, and if the saying is true you need to impress three people to offset the damage for every one person you disappoint.

Here are two of my recent customer experiences...

I flew on Virgin America last week. Absolutely fantastic. It was the first time in close to a decade that I felt like the guest of an airline instead of a package to be delivered from point A to point B. They seemed genuinely happy and appreciative that I selected them as my provider for this trip. 'Nuff said.

Part two was not necessarily a bad experience, but left me a bit puzzled. I called Salesforce.com's technical support to answer a question I had about using formulas in custom fields. I have a formula in place for my marketing campaigns that calculates cost per customer. It reads:

IF( NumberOfWonOpportunities = 0, ActualCost , ActualCost / NumberOfWonOpportunities)

Rather than just the obvious "ActualCost / NumberOfWonOpportunities" it reads this way so that if it is a new campaign, and there are no "closed/won" opportunities yet, the field does not read "#ERR" in my reports. The problem is that now, if the campaign is in the planning stages or there are no "closed/won" opportunities it says that the cost per customer is the same as the actual cost.

For example, let's say I am planning an event and the actual cost of the event is $10,000. As of right now, since the event is in the planning stages there are no "closed/won" opportunities yet. In other words...no customers. Yet the field reads that my cost per customer is $10,000 even though I have no customers yet.

My question was, is there some way to tweak the formula to leave the field blank, or maybe insert "not applicable" as the value of the field if there are no customers yet?

The response I got from customer support at SFDC (after holding for a few minutes) was that "basic support does not deal with formulas" and that it might be a good idea to post on one of the forums and "hope one of our developers might respond."

SFDC gets big points for making the phone number for support easy to find, while still making all the other options like "log a case" and "search the knowledge base" very obvious. It is always amazing to me how hard it is to find a phone number on some websites, including the phone company! And I should absolutely note that typically I have had nothing but good experiences dealing with SFDC tech support. It's just that this response was so uncharacteristically unhelpful I wanted to share. I need to either pay for VIP support, or post on a forum and hope for the best. How odd is that?

And I still don't know if it is even possible to write the formula that way. It might be obvious to many of you formula or query gurus out there...if so, please shoot me a note or comment at the bottom of the blog.

Or at least point me to a forum I might be able to get an answer from.

Update: I think I found the formula...

IF( NumberOfWonOpportunities > 0, ActualCost / NumberOfWonOpportunities, null)