Joe Maimon wrote:
"How much pain can we inflict on our customers before they break (whether or not it increases revenue or decreases costs)?"
I see it in a different way. At one point, a corporation's accountants decide that growth through acquisition of new customers will slow and the only way to continue to grow revenus is to start nickel and diming existing customers to death, cutting customer support (aka: outsource to a different country where the folks there are given a simple 2 page script and no other training) and implementeing strange new billing schemes. And in the past, such schemes have worked with minimal customer complaints (of course, the customer service side in in cahoots and aren't about to report to the board that the decisions made have been highly unpopular) and those measures become permanent. The big problem is that upper management are more focused on pleasing the Wall Street Casino analysts than they are running their company and pleasing their customers.