The Heartbreak of Customer Service
by Don Libey
This article appeared in the January 23 and 30 editions of DMNews. We believe it is sufficiently provocative to reprint here for the concentrated CEO universe of the business-to-business catalog and online worlds.
As an observer of the direct marketing industry for over thirty years, I have been afforded some perspective with which to comment on significant trends, positive and negative. Over the past twelve years, I have been carefully watching and collecting the evidence of a major shift in the concept and execution of customer service. In my 1993 book, Libey LLC On Customers, I described the historic practice of customer service and its deep foundation for near-permanent customer loyalty. Superb customer service was, in my estimation at the time, the hidden secret causing the growing dominance of direct marketing over retail. Now, as we embark on the second half of the first decade of the somewhat tarnished New Millennium, Americas practice of customer servicewith a few bright exceptionshas plunged to what can only be called appalling new lows.
Three Influences
- Expectations. Nothing really works any longer. The hub system of airline transportation is a horrendously flawed and utterly failed experiment that has produced no customer service, satisfaction, loyalty, utility or profitability. One could not create such a colossal failure even in great fiction. Cable television, cell phone and telephone companies are faceless, service-starved behemoths dedicated to their own local oligarchies. Corporate restaurant chains produce cookie-cutter formulas that spew out mediocre food along with obsequious wait staff whose only skill is writing their name upside down in crayon on the cheap paper covering the table. The commercial experience nearly everywhere has become dreary and gray, and we have become anesthetized and tolerant of dreary, gray experiences.
The past twenty years have brought an erosion of customer expectations. It is no longer expected that retail personnel will be knowledgeable, helpful, courteous, or caring about your purchasing experience. As customers, we have learned to expect almost nothing, and we are seldom disappointed as a result. The shopping experience in the retail setting of 2006 is vastly inferior to that of 1976, 1986, or even 1996. The customer has either dumbed down personally or has been dumbed down by the industryor both.
To compete, merchants much fight price at every turn. To compete, merchants must battle selection, facility cost, wage cost, cheap imports and a host of overhead, inventory and other costs, the control of which has been elevated to a finely-tuned art by big-box merchants with near-socialistic global appetites, specifically Wal-Mart and its spawn. As a result, staffing costs have been reduced in quantity, quality, training and benefits. The result: retail customer service staffing has migrated from a meaningful career to a minimum wage, part-time, temporary, high turn-over, zombie-like, dead-end job.
And so, after more than a decadeindeed, almost two decadesof customer service erosion, the 2006 customer has almost zero expectations as a learned and conditioned response. Wal-Martthe present-day Skinner Boxhas trained the rats to expect nothing and be happy when we get nothing. It only takes one generation to establish a new norm. If the only thing you have ever known is zero customer service, then zero customer service appears normal.
- Internet. In its second incarnation, Internet commerce has elevated customer service to algorithms. A classic example of the dichotomy of the appearance of good customer service and the reality of appalling customer service is found with Amazon.com. If you wish to purchase a book, or a smoked turkey, or a toy, or a tool, the algorithms are essentially flawless and instantly satisfying. The appearance of customer service is matchless. But, if you are a supplier attempting to correct errors in product descriptions, release dates for newly published books, prices, carton quantities, or thousands of supply-chain details involved in fulfillment and product listing, or if you are a customer hoping to actually return something, Amazon.com is an unparalleled failure. The company cannot be telephoned. Human problem-solvers do not exist. Vendor service has been reduced to faceless emails sent in endless loops of frustrating, non-functional, problem non-resolution. There is no chink in the outer skin through which one might gain entry to the real company behind the faade. Amazon.com has wonderful algorithms, but no viscera, no blood, no soul.
The Internet experience has capitalized on the dumbing down of customer service expectations by reducing expectations further to canned processes that fit seventy percent of the demands. This seventy percent solution goes by the pseudonym, Customer Relationship Marketing, which is a term that simply means, No Service Here. The ubiquitous CRM systems have brought you the Festival of Miracles of attempting to correct a telephone billing problem, retrieving the service history for your automobile warranty, finding your lost blouse at the dry cleaner, flying anywhere on schedule, registering your Microsoft Office software at some location in Bangladesh, and unsuccessfully downloading any driver for any computer peripheral without even the vestige of human intervention. Increasingly, little works and the only way to fix the customer service problems that crop up at every turn is to pay someone who knows how to go around the problem to the solution. The computer on which this is being written has a Hewlett-Packard wireless printer that has required no less than five house calls by the Geek Squad at $89.00 an hour each to re-install the software due to glitches for which there are no solutions. Try to get someone at HP to actually talk to you about the problem. Try to use your printer at five in the morning by resorting to CRM. Nobodys home and never will be!
- Price. Sorry. I will stand my ground. Price is becoming the primary driver of commerce and, as a consequence, customer service has eroded and will erode further. The customer without expectations, classically conditioned to expect nothing, Skinner-Box-trained to seek out a Smiley Face representing an impoverished mentality of Low PricesAlways, will ultimately use price as the mindless determinant for consumption. And the mega-retailers want that to occur. This disturbing trend is very real and growing, not only in the U.S. but globally. To obtain the lowest possible price, most people will forego customer service, convenience, quality, even cleanliness. And, at the end of the evolution, we are left with low price and virtually nothing else inside the maze. Combine price with the Internet and zero expectation for customer service, and you arrive at a place that the retail world had to go to in order to compete globally: lowest price-driven, comparative, product integrators that have reduced costs to the lowest possible level through greatest-majority algorithms and the least number of employees. This is called Profit Maximization. Its what the shareholders have been classically conditioned to get when they peck at the investment lever.
The Retail Experience
The convergence of these three influences has produced a retail experience of customer self-service that has all but replaced customer service. If you want something, get it yourself, do it yourself, research it yourself, sell yourself. By and large, the only retail customer service function that has not been converted to self-service by the dominant retailers is the receipt of cash and credit card charges, and even that function is endangered. Within ten to fifteen years, I predict that the entire check-out/payment function will be automated in retail stores as it has been so successfully done through algorithms on the Internet. In fact, it may well be that retail stores will only be staffed with a few stocking personnel and a few guards to open and close the doors and to monitor theft. It is even possible that there will be no employees and no assistant managers, just a few part-time stockers, guards and an overall store manager supervising automated systems of self-service processes. If you think about it, the bar code is responsible for huge advances in the evolution of customer self-service. No one is required to price products; no one is required to know prices at the check-out; and bar code readers are faster and infinitely less costly than cashiers over time. Peopleand their inherent service humanityhave been removed from the equation.
The 2005 holiday season produced repetitive headlines extolling the double-digit gains in online shopping versus the flat bricks and mortar retail store sales. For the first time, we saw clear evidence of the future online dominance over the malls and traditional stores. I have referred to the fifty-year-old mall experiment as Cities of the Dead in other articles. The bleached bones of the Mall of America will be unearthed one day by paleo-consumptionologists who will attempt to uncover the meanings behind mystical gathering places called Food Courts and long-forgotten cults known as The Gap. Any serious blip in the U.S. consumption-driven economy will turn these overbuilt palaces of excess to vacant, weed-filled museums owned by rapidly disappearing pension funds and insurance companies with too many claims from hurricane disasters. The retail complex is tenuous at best, and building strong, expensive customer service capability and capacity is not on their horizon.
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