Technology as a Band-Aid Syndrome
Many companies have poor quality management. They either don’t know their business very well or are focused on short-term financial gains due to the compensation of stock options. Stock options are a drug in the US business sphere, continually driving the short-sighted decision. Technology as a Band-Aid Syndrome (TBAS for short) is when a company follows poor practices and relies upon a technology purchase rather than addressing the poor practice. The best example of this we can find is in the CRM software category. TBAS has several different dimensions. In its purest form, it is just a band-aid – but in a more extreme form, the technology exacerbated the problem by allowing the companies to either become distracted from addressing the issue or by providing the company with capabilities that worsen the problem.
In the CRM field, customer service is increasingly outsourced or reduced in its compensation because the thought is that the real star of the show is the CRM system, which contains all the information about the customer. Some companies have converted their customer service personnel into robots that just read through areas of the CRM system. They are empowered to do very little for the customer – but are told to stated catchphrases such as//
“I understand your concern”