Customer Service - The Great Hypocrisy of the 21st Century

I must admit, I love reading all those wonderful customer service articles. Some are so inspiring, you can’t help but get obsessed and excited every time another article pops up. And if you are like myself and happen to do any sales within customer service units or call centers, it becomes clear that things really are not changing.

I take that back. Things are changing, but they are not changing as fast as the speed of new articles being written on how to reinvent, redefine, and revive great customer service everyone seems to reference from the past.

To me, customer service is the great hypocrisy of the twenty first century. Why? Well, we have the tools and technology, we have the concepts and innovation, we have great and wonderful people, and yet, we don’t have as many companies that seem to be able to put it all together into a business operation that makes sense.

Lets take a moment and look at a stereotypical company that offers customer service. Good customer service is expensive. Having the right technology with the necessary features, correctly sized team of experienced staff, clear business process, and the high morale environment is not easy. Yet, looking top to bottom from the senior management, it is very easy to identify a business unit that clearly does not produce anything seemingly important, but merely maintains the customer base (Yes, I am being facetious). Comparing Sales and Marketing Department with Product Management, Product Development, and finally Customer Service, it is easy to point the finger at “the one” easy target.

Since senior management is always under the pressure to meet or exceed shareholder expectations, the experiments begin with trying to get more “juice” out of the Customer Service department by cutting costs. Once the senior management makes a common mistake of viewing and treating customer service department as cost containment rather than long term investment, everything goes downhill.

The next steps to reduce costs result in outsourcing customer service to general purpose call centers which typically share the staff for calls coming in from multiple clients. This means that one agent will pick up the call for customers of several different organizations. How can we expect this agent to know everything to handle calls for every organization’s customer, especially if the customer service pertains to different types of products or services? No wonder that we experience significant differences in the quality of response within the same organization. Under these conditions, getting great service equates to plain and simple luck.

Certainly, we anticipate the call centers, which have an interest in having happy customers, to constantly challenge themselves to offer better service. For example, call centers can utilize better tools to help them offer quality customer service. However, with most call centers charging by the minute, any technology that is designed to shorten the call becomes counterproductive to the call center’s bottom line. The reluctance to adopt new, better technology is unfortunately real. It is far too easy and beneficial to remain in status quo, waiting for the company to provide guidelines for current high level customer service goals.

While high level goals are great to have, they are generally too broad and are often disconnected from the actual approach on how to reach them, and especially how to reach them correctly. Any goals stated in terms of savings are easier to reach in detriment to customer service quality. After all, every employee’s performance is tied to some measurements of strategic goals, so there is no incentive to resist taking the easy road.

So, here we have a vicious spiral that is almost impossible to change, even when knowing how to change it. I say nearly impossible because breaking this spiral requires significant commitment and investments, but since every stereotypical company is trying to do more with less and views customer service as cost containment, it totally seems to make a much more logical sense to spend more money on sales and marketing, on ads, and even on merger and acquisitions to limit consumer’s options to depart.

How do we break these trends and actually move forward? In my experience, the key word is ownership. Customer service is not something to be delegated. It is something that must be owned. The sooner organizations realize its value, the sooner it can justify the right investment, and the sooner things can change for the better. After all, each one of us is someone’s customer and we as customers all know our magic golden rules.

With that, I do bow down to all those great minds that take upon this difficult challenge. The dedicated customer service evangelists, the hard working customer service agents, managers, and executives, to all of you that still embark on a journey to break this hypocrisy despite the heavy lifting. Thank you!