By Andrew Chalmers, Director, Catalyst Program TM Forum

Despite what my wife may tell you, I’m not a grumpy person. Generally, I’m tolerant of other people’s mistakes, because we are, after all, only human (although my wife may also have a different opinion on that one).

But what I do find is that I’m becoming less tolerant of the things in life that should work but don’t – especially when I’m paying for them. So when my new mobile handset arrives with an instruction book written in a typeface too small to read without the use of a magnifying lens, or my new laptop has the instruction manual already on the hard disk and the first instruction is “Read this before switching on the laptop,” or when my travel insurance does not cover luggage lost for less that 10 days, I begin to wonder if other people get annoyed at this type of thing and what the cumulative effect might be.

Despite efforts by service providers (anyone selling anything to me I consider to be a service provider) to make it as difficult as possible to change – bundled services, tariffs that are difficult to compare and so on – I have found that it is surprisingly easy to change suppliers. And once I started on this road, it actually felt quite liberating.

Why should these people get my money when there are plenty of others out there more than happy to get my business, and perhaps they can offer a better level of service quality?

Subsequently, my gas and electricity supplier, travel and household insurance, mobile phone, ISP and laptop suppliers have all come under new scrutiny. I even look twice at the services I get for free – my virus detection and Internet calls for example. I’m not looking for the cheapest; I’m looking for a service provider that actually cares about the quality of the services they provide.

And it’s not just about the quality at the point of sale, it’s the quality of the whole lifecycle experience, from the moment I first hear about a product to the day I decide not to use it anymore, and more importantly what happens if I have a problem.

We all know that it’s much more difficult and expensive to get a new customer than it is to keep an existing one, so what do we need to do?

I believe that quality in an organization is a mindset, and that the “user’s perception” of the quality offered is the only one that really matters. There is no point in telling me that the service I’m paying for was available 99.999% of the time, and that the terms of my SLA are being met, if my cable connection fails when Scotland are just about to kick off in the final of the World Cup (I can dream). I’m going to be upset.

If this is a subject that gets you fired up or you have an interest in what TM Forum is doing in this area, why not come along to one of our Quality of Service or SLA Management training courses during TM Forum Management World 2008 in Nice in a couple of weeks. Oh, and you’ll get to meet Mr. Grumpy in person!