Will The Recession Actually Improve Customer Service?
By Dr. Gary. S. Goodman 2000
You’ve heard it shouted from rooftops and schmoozed about at Starbucks. We’re living in the "Era of the Customer!" Not so fast. Arguably, what we’ve been living in, at least during the past decade, is really an Era of Technology. And technology, in the form of ATM’s and PC’s and fax-backs and email and the web have made certain contributions to service, but not that many. Yes, we can determine our account balances at the bank by phone or online. We can trade stocks for as little as five bucks a share. (Wow!) And our callers can reach us no matter where we are on earth (especially, if we own a satellite phone, right?). We can order lunch from Kozmo.com and never, ever have to leave our desks or speak to an order-taker, again!
We can even track our Land’s End purchase from a distant shore to our very door. But, I have a simple question for you: How have we improved the human side of service? Specifically: What innovations have we produced for putting customers and contacts more at ease? What improvements have we made in creating rapport and identification with our fellow earthlings? What new organizations have come to the fore to earn the prestigious designation as "legendary" service providers? The reason it’s hard to answer these queries is simple: Our sustained, booming economy has been fueled by productivity "improvements" that really replace the human touch with cyber-touch.
Our good times haven’t been built on a foundation of "mano-a-mano" or hand-made service, but on the technologies that we’ve employed to eliminate as many humans from the "service-chain" as we could. I’ll illustrate this for you. I bought a rather advanced desktop PC system from a well-known manufacturer that gleefully cites surveys indicating that is the best customer service provider in its field. When the sales rep at this firm configured my system, I told him I wanted voice-recognition software so I could "speak my articles and books" into the computer.
No problem. He promised me a package that supposedly included the right software and a headset to match. As it turned out, he sold me the wrong stuff. The headset jack wouldn’t fit the back of my PC tower, and the version of the software he sold me was trumped by a newer version, a few weeks before. I called Customer Service, which told me to talk to Tech Support. I did so, and they sent me back to Service, and they sent me back to Tech Support. I repeated my story several times. Each time, I was asked if I had tried to contact them by email or through the Web, which I hadn’t. What they were trying to do was "off-load" my time-consuming call to another division that could handle the problem at their convenience, not at mine.
Finally, someone acknowledged the company’s error and promised that I’d get an Airborne pick-up and appropriate credit on my charge statement. I waited for six weeks, and neither occurred. I called back, and the CSR kept interrupting me in an effort to tell me that I had "waited too long" to complain about the non-pick-up, and I was out of luck because they wouldn’t accept the product at that point. I got uncorked and issued an ultimatum. Within 48 hours, the pick-up was made, but I’m still waiting for credit to be issued.
My story isn’t unique. Most of the people I dealt with at the computer company were prickly, peevish, incredibly impatient, and very poorly prepared. I’m no stranger to high-tech firms, having trained tons of people in customer and tech support, including Ph.D.’s who work in the cloning end of biotech. But most noteworthy is the fact that these "service providers" and their low-tech or mid-tech counterparts seem to be following a pattern. Today’s firms are trying to substitute smart technology for smart people. But it’s not working. They’re disinvesting in the human side of customer service training, leaving their staffs "machine-smart, but people-dumb."
In a word, we’ve bred a generation of non-helpers who only feel competent to provide virtual service. Sadly, today’s emerging ideal of great customer service is really a lot of rhetoric that finally devolves into non-service. If there’s any corporate passion left in the customer service field, it seems to be manifested in the desire to put all the data in the world on the web, and then to turn customers loose to help themselves! This tendency is really driven by cost-cutting, and not the noble intention to invent new and better customer satisfactions.
There’s also something remarkably Orwellian about this. Remember, what "Big Brother" asserted in the novel, 1984? "War Is Peace," and "Hate Is Love" Now, we’re being told by our technological wizards that, "Self-Service Is Customer Service!" It’s somewhat ironic that Jack Welch, Chairman of General Electric, is retiring. You may recall that he earned the nickname, "Neutron-Jack," because he presided over the downsizing of G.E. before downsizing became chic. The wry humor in the moniker comes from the fact that a neutron bomb will supposedly kill all of the occupants, but leave the buildings, intact. Well, during the past decade, nearly every CEO has become a tacit Neutron Jack.
As recession draws near, we may become humbled enough by our difficulties that we’ll rediscover that the only permanent way to improve customer service is by improving our communications with those who really pay our wages. It may require us to re-think the purported advantages to relying so heavily upon those sentinels that we’ve stationed between us and our customers during the past decade.
Dr. Gary S. Goodman is a professional speaker and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Monitoring, Measuring, & Managing Customer Service.
Will The Recession Actually Improve Customer Service?