Saving & Spending

A Few Thoughts on the God-Awful State of Customer Service

By Brad Tuttle | @bradrtuttle | August 31, 2010 | +

Everybody loves the airline attendant who dramatically quit his job because he was overworked and sick of being pushed around by customers. But wait just a second. Aren’t consumers sick of workers in the “service” industry who couldn’t care less about making sure the customer is satisfied?

There’s no shortage of reasons consumers hate service workers (and vice versa). It’s a standoff in which both sides feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick—either via pitiful customer service efforts or via pitiful employment paychecks.

Ultimately, both sides of this standoff should be angry not so much with each other but with the exasperating business model that makes confrontations inevitable.

In his New Yorker column, James Surowiecki explores today’s “Crisis in Customer Service.” While the working man (and woman) has reason to be angry, he writes …

everyone knows that the contemporary customer is mad as hell, too—fed up with inept service, indifferent employees, and customer-service departments that are harder to negotiate than Kafka’s Castle.

Why is it that businesses do things that will drive customers batty—and that will most likely drive them away? It comes down to money. Businesses don’t see good reason to spend money on something that doesn’t clearly and directly bring in quantifiable revenues. Surowiecki explains:

Customer service is a classic example of what businessmen call a “cost center”—a division that piles up expenses without bringing in revenue—and most companies see it as tangential to their core business, something they have to do rather than something they want to do.

How unbelievably shortsighted.

And how blind these businesses are to customers’ true experiences. Surowiecki cites a survey that asked big companies if they would describe themselves as delivering “superior” customer service. Guess how many answered “yes”?

80%

Now guess how many consumers described these same companies as delivering “superior” customer service?

8%

That’s some disparity. As customer service continues to deteriorate, and as consumers come to increasingly assume things like automated customer service lines with endless waits and blatant lies like “Your call is important to us,” smart businesses should come to realize that the customer service bar is lower—and that today, it’s easier than ever to differentiate your company from the pack with (crazy as it seems) actual quality customer service. When you hear “Your call is important to us” dozens of times while you’re on hold forever, what they’re really saying is: “Your money is important to us. Your call? Not so much.”

These days, it doesn’t take much to exceed customer expectations. I’m happily surprised whenever I call a customer service line and am greeted with a human (non-recorded) voice that says “Hello” rather than automatically asking me to press 1 if I want to review the list of options in English. Nowadays, even this minimal human touch qualifies as “superior” customer service, if only compared to the competition out there.

Read more:
The Reward for Bad Customer Service

Related Topics: customer service, Saving & Spending

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  • http://thethain.wordpress.com thethain

    I think the companies responding to the survey are considering themselves graded on a curve, “The average hold time to talk to a real person in our industry is 24 minutes, our average time is 20 minutes, we must be superior.”

    It is all a matter of pressures in the company though. Salesmen often have incentives for making sales, regardless of if it is actually what a customer needs or requires, this leads to more customer service calls. And customer service managers are often rewarded for keeping costs down, again regardless to how much service is actually required by the products, this means that customer service managers can be paid more by NOT helping the customers. If you hang up on hold after 20 minutes, and don’t get your iToy replaced, then thats X dollars the customer service has saved.

    But ultimately it will still fall to consumers to correct the trend. If people still use price as the final verdict in purchasing equipment, which is likely if no company can provide acceptable service, then companies will continue to cut costs however possible, which includes service.

  • caroljayne

    I think the “crisis in customer service” is an indication that there’s been a big change in the age-old assumption that “the customer is always right.” While this assumption might have been right at a time when manners were a valued asset, perhaps an abuse of the power that came with “always being right” effected a change in the way customer service is now being given.

    It seems to me that kindness and manners have disappeared in the marketplace. It’s been replaced by resentment on all levels. Over the last 30 years victimization has become appealing. It’s pretty easy to change the way we see most of what happens to us by totally giving up our part in creating it. We’d all rather be the victim, wouldn’t we? When it comes to money, and our new tight economy, it’s much more appealing to be a victim on the sales floor, on either side of the checkout. Perhaps there was a time when people looked at each other over the checkout counter and actually saw each other as people, and were kind and courteous regardless.

    These days so many customers look at the customer service representatives as punching bags to use at or after they checkout. Those punching bags have lost the desire to assume the position that the customer is always right. Call it an end to total domination. As a consumer, a customer service rep, a business owner, and a human being, I can tell you that I will try so much harder to help anyone that I respect or care about. Nobody wants to help a jerk. Perhaps the change in what consumers are getting (or not getting) is the result of what consumers put out there. Perhaps it is “unbelievably shortsighted” of consumers to believe that they are always right. Where did personal accountability go? Where’s the incentive for change and growth if we’re always right? Perhaps we should realize that we have never been “always right”, and we should accept when we are wrong. Maybe that would inspire mutual trust and respect as well as a willingness to help each other.

  • http://heartman.wordpress.com/ Heartman

    It is too bad that all that matters is profits. Some day soon the chickens will come home to roost.

  • ficheye

    “Your money is important to us… your call, not so much”. That sums it up. Nothing more needs to be added.

  • mzscience21

    Like caroljayne said, customer service reps are tired of being punching bags.

    I have worked tech support at a local ISP for three years. We have no automated syatem so the first thing customers hear is me. I have become so cynical about people. I’ll tell you that if you are short and curt with me, I will return the favor. If you treat me with respect and say “thank you,” I will jump through hoops to help you, because so few people do it.

    In big businesses, it’s about the bottom line. In small businesses if you get bad support, it’s because you’re approaching a tired, burned out person with more hate and anger and they just don’t care.

  • oldmom1

    My husband and I have had to redefine Customer Service. Now WE say to THEM: “Hello. I am your customer. How may I serve you?” Sad but true.

  • oldmom1

    I actually had an online customer service person tell me “It’s not about what you want to buy – it’s about what we want to sell you”. Say what??

  • caroljayne

    It’s my experience, as is Mzscience21’s, that customers can wear a you down with their “short and curt” attitudes. Sometimes customers who need help are afraid that they’re not going to get help, so they come into the situation behaving as if they’ve already been disappointed. Some of these people yell from the beginning, thinking this will force the help along. They should think long and hard about why nobody wants to help them. Then there are the people who clearly ask for things that they cannot have, should not have, and will not get. They are told “No.” Usually those are the customers who label the situation as one resulting from poor customer service. We all hate to be told “no” whether or not it’s reasonable to expect the thing we asked for. We might as well blame our disappointment on the messenger since we all deserve everything we want.

    It’s interesting to me that this “God-Awful State of Customer Service” article seems to separate the “working man (and woman)” from customer service representatives. Customer service people are customers also. People in the service industry are usually very polite customers; probably because they understand how ask for help when they need it. I wonder how customer service reps would rate their experiences as customers in today’s marketplace. The author of this article says, “Both sides feel like they’re getting the short end of the stick—either via pitiful customer service efforts or via pitiful employment paychecks.” I think he’s just trying to pit both sides against the big bad invisible businessman at the top of the money pile. Like I said before, it’s nice to be a victim. Maybe the problem is that people want change, but they always want someone else to do the changing. Change the way you ask, and it’s more likely that you’ll receive.

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