Sunday, September 8, 2013

On Bad Customers

I don't usually comment on other blogs; I have always felt that if I'm going to start that kind of thing it will eventually reach the point where someone is blogging about the blog that someone wrote about somebody blogging about another blog - at which point things will finally have gotten out of hand. But I make the occasional exception, when I feel that someone needs a wider audience, or an author needs to take an idea even further. And in the case of Matt Walsh's recent post about bad customers, I think both apply...

If you didn't catch it - and there are around 100,000,000 blogs out there, so you might not have - Mr. Walsh suggested to a patron whom he witnessed having a meltdown in a fast-food joint that maybe the reason she "always" gets bad customer service is that she is a bad customer. That is, anybody who would spend that much time yelling, screaming and cursing in public over something as trivial as a condiment being left on a junk food sandwich costing a dollar or so is most likely a miserable human being who believes that it is perfectly acceptable to treat minimum-wage employees like crap just because there is nothing they can do about it. That being the case, there's effectively no chance that this person won't find something wrong in almost any customer service situation, because what they really want is the chance to exert dominance over someone...

Now, it is possible that this is just an overt symptom of the entitlement we've seen in almost every other aspect of modern life; as a college instructor I've certainly seen my share of students who believe they should receive credit for work they haven't done, or even that they should received top marks for assignments done incorrectly. But what concerns me the most is the cumulative effect all of this is having on business as a whole. Most people will never have a screaming tantrum in the middle of a junk food stand, because most of us have matured a bit since we were two, but every time you live through something like this it makes the more ordinary rudeness we all have to endure seem more acceptable - or, at least, less important. And believe me on this, the effect is even worse when you're the one on the receiving end of the meltdown...

I'm not saying that everyone who has ever had a miserable excuse for a customer go off on them is going to end up doing the same thing; far from it. Most of us who have worked customer service jobs go out of our way to be nice to the people stilling doing that kind of work. I am saying that the customer service standard common when my generation were children is rare today, and when it occurs at all it is generally considered "old-fashioned" and most likely occupies a major part of the company's strategy. As time goes by, fewer companies are really trying to "take care of their customers" in the traditional sense, because they know that fewer and fewer of their customers value good customer service at all, or at most see it as a weakness and will try to exploit such service in order to get free products or services from the company...

Over time, as customer service is valued less its overall quality declines, which leads to even less value being placed on the customer service function - and the cycle repeats. At the same time, the increased use of automation and the rise of self-checkout and similar services is lowering the number of people actually serving in the customer service role in the first place. If this trend continues it bodes ill for the service sector; what most people may not realize is that it bodes ill for out entire civilization as well. Historically, any society in which civility becomes commonly regarded as a weakness (and rudeness is considered a strength) has not lasted long. I agree with every one of Mr. Walsh's points; I also believe that if he's right, what we are seeing isn't just the decline of American commerce, but the beginning of the end for our entire civilization...

I'm not sure we can fix this. But I believe we'd better start trying...

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