I love dropping by Francois Gossieaux's "Emergence Marketing" blog because it is full of gems like this:

"Brands should put their customer service at the center of their brand universe. Customer service is where people give you real feedback about their brand "experiences," and most often when things start going negative, as was the case when Jeff Jarvis started documenting his negative experiences with Dell on his blog - it starts off in the customer service department. In fact, Pete said, "the value of the customer service department may be 10 times as valuable as bean counters account for..."

(from a conversation with Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Buzzmetrics)

No kidding.

And aside from the feedback aspect of having an adequately leveraged customer service department, think about its value in terms of turning angry or frustrated customers into your biggest fans?

What in the world am I talking about?

Read this. Hopefully, it will give you a whole new perspective on the true value of a focused, independent, marketing-oriented in-house customer service department. Everything you need to know about how to turn your customer service department into a team of marketing superheroes is right there.

Well... okay, maybe not all of it, but it'll at least give you a pretty good idea.

Starting to get why outsourcing customer service is a lousy idea? I hope so.