I think this thread should be kept alive with as many shared anacdotal customer service experiences as possible. I have learned a little more about Surefire: 500 employees, massive government contracts. How many customer service representatives do you think Surefire has employed, how big is that department in a company of 500?
I have worked in customer service, and it all comes down to individuals, and especially the experience of the managers (unlike in most tech spaces where managers are more or less dead weight). Customer service can be very streamlined even in a small company, like the startup software company I worked for... but when I left, half the employees worked in customer service, because most of the developers were laid off after the 1.0 revision was completed and released. This is untasteful, but ordinary and often necessary in software startups, which must stretch their capital investments until something turns a profit, and which is a completely different animal to manufacturing physical machines (if we can agree that a flashlight is a machine).
Just looking at the size of the Surefire customer base, I would estimate that a good, functional customer service department would need at least 500 employees just in customer service. I bet Surefire has far less than 50 individuals employed as customer service.
At some point, successful private companies outgrow their britches and need to go public to support their customer base, but I could only speculate why Surefire has remained a privately owned company. The answer would not be as simple as greed, because a company like Surefire going public would instantly make the owners filthy rich beyond anyone's dreams, as well as make every current employee independently weathy. Even the part-time masseuses at Google retired to independent wealth when Google went public. A reason to stay private might be that the US Government required Surefire to in order to keep military technology in the US. But this is just wild speculation on my part.
