One of the long standing traditions of the industry has been to look at MMOs from the perspective of every other game on the market. We treat our online worlds the same as we treat our single-player experiences, which means we seem to forget that the customer still exists after they have picked up the game and are now sitting down to play it.In a traditional "selling boxes" industry, where people can get away with selling a game and have that be the end of it, MMOs walk the path of a service rather than a product. Getting a user to buy the game isn't the goal, it's the beginning of the process. And to that end, one deparment can make or break a user's experiences with a game when troubles begin to come down the line -- customer service.
Adam over at T=Machine has written an amazingly in-depth piece on why the MMO industry needs to change up their approach to this neglected department and how good customer service is basically an open path to free word-of-mouth marketing. It takes a great analysis of the current approach and remodifies it to better handle the service model of selling a game rather than the box pushing model. It's a long post, but close to mandatory reading if you're interested in the theory of business
