Non-Story

I was wandering around on some of the online news sites this week when I came across a story from Reuters on the MSNBC site about how Americans are getting fed up with poor customer service according to a new poll conducted this past March. In particular, the study noted that 64 percent of respondents reported having walked out of a retail store because of poor customer assistance, and 67 percent reported hanging up on a customer service call before their problems were even addressed by the company. It struck me as a complete non-story – all of the problems people are complaining about on the survey have been with us for decades, if not generations, and the fact that people hate having to spend half an hour working their way through a computerized phone tree before getting a live person on the telephone can’t possibly be news to anyone. A much better question is why so many companies are still failing to correct such basic failures in their business model…

To begin with, let’s consider how these things are actually supposed to work. In retail, the primary duty of the sales clerks is to keep the shelves full of product (whatever it is the store sells) and neat; the two primary tasks that make up their day are stocking and straightening. Naturally, this puts them at odds with customers, who love to take things off of shelves and redistribute them at random around the store before buying a few of them. Nor does it help that customers will ask for products you don’t have, inventory you can’t get, or products your company has never carried in the first place, and then ask if you have anything hidden in the back room – and this doesn’t even consider people who will let their children run wild rather than discipline them, shoplifters who believe they’re putting one over on “the man,” or people who do things in the Incontinent Supplies aisle that you really don’t want to hear about. You can combat some of this by hiring the right people, paying and training them well, and rotating them through different tasks and assignments each month, but it’s still going to be impossible to make every customer who passes through the store happy every time they come in…

Automated phone systems have two basic issues: they do not handle anything but routine calls well, and everyone believes that their call is special, important, and not routine at all. If you try to make an automated phone system complex enough to handle all situations people will complain that it’s too complicated, and if you try to make it simple enough to get through quickly, people will complain that it doesn’t have the option they need. You can cut through a lot of this by having the “Agent” option (you can speak with a live person anytime by saying the word “agent”), but this will drive up your costs, making your entire company and all of your products/services less appealing. And unless you’re willing to hire three shifts worth of telephone representatives, you’re going to have people going berserk just because your customer service department is closed and they can’t speak to a live person at 3:00 in the morning…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t bad retail clerks or idiotic voice systems; I’ve had to confront both over the years – and oddly enough, I’ve been responsible for managing both over the years. But I’ve also encountered outstanding examples of both kinds of customer service (Nordstrom for the first, and American Express Travel for the second come to mind), and there is no reason that all businesses can’t live up to those standards. It’s just that doing so will require the investment of significant amounts of time and money on the part of the company, and doing so will not always result in any significant improvement in revenue, especially when the company has no strong competition or is attempting to follow a low-cost strategy. The bottom line is that consumers will always complain about bad customer service and poorly-designed automated telephone systems, regardless of how good or bad the company’s service actually is, but the real deciding factor lies in the importance that the company places on good customer service – or the lack of it. And that will always remain a matter of strategy…