The New Yorker of 6 September 2010 has a really interesting article by James Surowiecki, Are You being Served, about the decay of customer service. “… The contemporary customer is as mad as hell…fed up with inept service, indifferent employees, and customer service departments that are harder to negotiate than Kafka’s Castle”.
Since we can easily recognise good and bad customer service, the article asks “Why can’t we get it right?”
Part of the problem seems to be that too many companies believe their own ‘bulldust’. The New Yorker points out that a recent survey of 300 big companies found that 80% described themselves as providing ‘superior service’, yet only 8% of consumers felt that way. Pretty telling!!
On the one hand, CEO’s routinely regard customer service as essential to success, but on the other hand, customer service is treated as a cost centre – where costs are accumulated without bringing in revenue. Most companies, it says, see customer service as tangential to their core business — something they have to do, rather than something they want to do.
But there is a real danger for customers in ignoring customer service. The article points out that few customers go to the trouble of lodging a complaint – only 6% in fact. Yet, thanks to the internet, tales of bad customer service find a ready and global audience – in one case millions of people watched a YouTube video about an instance of poor service by United Airlines.
The New Yorker concludes that the real problem is that companies have a ‘roving eye’ – they are always more interested in the customers they don’t have, so they pour money into sales and marketing to lure them, while giving their existing ones short shrift, in an effort to minimise costs and maximise revenue.
Not very smart. But then, who said that all CEO’s are all that bright?
Anyway, the article is a good read and the issue an essential one for all CEO’s and senior executives to ponder and rethink.
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How true it is, this explains why is it that you rarely feel valued. It’s the customers they don’t have that attract the most attention. The believing of their own ‘bulldust’ also rings very true and fails to acknowledge the impact of word of mouth. Or is that they truely don’t care as they know in nearly all cases their competitors, in the main, are the same as them.