Here's another all too common story from the customer support arena:

• Outsource Support in order to cut costs
• Give the new support staff a rigid set of scripts to follow, and no flexibility to adapt to circumstances
• Make sure to answer complaints with vaguely related, and irritating form letters
• Be utterly stunned when people aren't happy with you

I have some experience with this kind of "support" - I dealt with the fine outsourced support at ReplayTV here and here. This is the worst kind of situation, because there are no hard numbers other than the easy to find savings from lower cost support staff. The soft costs of having customers and prospects progressively more irritated by sub-standard support? That's harder to figure out, and doesn't show up on the spreadsheets that management looks at. Are those costs higher than the savings you get? It depends on the business you're in. If you support a complex product or service, then the soft costs likely outweigh the easy to spot personnel savings - but it will be really, really hard to quantify.