"What Has Happened to Customer Service?"

Bill Gates said, “ Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

I have always kept up on the trends of customer service mostly including all involvement with call centers and how they interact with web development.

In previous years in my customer experiences, I've noticed the trend for every 12 customer complaints there were 9 customer compliments. This wasn’t necessarily a bad ratio but it still wasn’t a good ratio, either.

I recently read an article that said as of 2018, the ratio of customer complaints has rosen to 16 compared to 12 as was in previous years. As a customer myself, I can tell you, I have had a lot of problems myself, I have addressed them directly to managers and on social media and have virtually very little to no response from the companies. There has been a few companies, I have moved on from as I feel they don’t value myself as a customer any longer. There are some companies that I feel I don't feel valued but because I'm loyal will stay but can you think what other people might be experiencing and how their being treated in the in the customer service world? Is it the fault of the customer service reps, management, the marketing plan? Where do you think all these complaints are coming from?

The most important part of negative feedback or compliments is with every negative feedback that specific person will tell at least 10–12 people, those people will tell at least 5–6 people and the list goes down by halves. The problem is that people will forget the person they spoke to and the facts will get misinterpreted but the companies name will always remain the same. After a complaint is said, there is roughly going to be at least 20 people who will hear about this experience. Also, if the person knows the person who has had the bad experience they are more likely to tell more people. So the people who hear about the negative experience could go exponentially higher depending on the circumstances and the people told!

As for the 9 compliments, people don’t tell very many people because they expect companies to give them value and good service for their money. People want to be valued and they expect good customer service. They don't believe they should have to ask for good service. If you don’t receive good customer service most people will move on to other companies some will complain, some won't complain because they feel the company didn't care enough about them and may or may not move and then you have those loyal people who will remain loyal customers of that company until something pushes them over the edge and they leave and don't look back. These are the customers you want to retain but aren't going to be able to because they gave you so many chances. Obviously, it is a lot easier to retain customers than it is to go out and gain new customers as the cost of marketing, sales, ect are a lot higher than to offer the customer an incentive to stay.

I would like to bring to your attention now to our generations. Our Traditionalists or Silent Generation have all retired and our Baby Boomers will retire in approximately 10-15 years. Therefore, our upcoming generations are coming up quickly and strongly and we must have our customer service and our market prepared for them. As you can already tell, we live in a "now" society. People have busy lives and don't want to wait on hold for a customer service representative and this is due to the younger generations let me explain:

Traditionalists or the Silent Generation, were born 1945 or before, did not believe in computers and have all retired at this point. Our Baby Boomers, who were born between 1946–1964, really didn’t have much to do with computers because they had larger families and the Mother, mostly, stayed at home to take care of the children while the Father would go and make the money. The later Baby Boomers, born between the 1950’s and 1964, used mainframes and computers if their job required them but rarely had computers in their house. It wasn’t a necessity for them. Our Generation X, who were born between 1965 and 1976, were really the ones who were fascinated with computers. Generation X were one of the first generations were computers became a way of the life for them because of their jobs or simply interest. There was no longer a need for paper records and they saw how quickly and fast computers could make the customer experience better. At this point, the Generation X had computers in the house so all of the rest of the future generations would grow up having access to some sort of a computer in their home. Millennials and Generation Y learned from their parents. These generations, were born between 1977–1995, learned just how quickly computers could solve problems and do so much more than what their parents ever knew. They learned quick and those who were able to master computers did well in technology and their field in study. However, when it comes to this generation you have 8 seconds to capture their attention on a website before they will move onto another website. It’s not a long time but if you can capture their attention, they will stay and look around. As for Generation Z, who was born in 1996, our currently first college graduates as of 2018. They are very conscious of their money. They will only buy from a company who will treat their employees and the world with respect. They are willing to pay more just to satisfy those needs. Generation Z college students are very frugal with their money and 80% who went to a trade school or college will enter the workforce with no student debt. Generation Z kids are not as patient, when they go to websites, we find they will give us roughly 4 seconds to catch their attention and if we don’t, they will move onto another website.

I think businesses need to refocus their total customer experience and their marketing strategy rather then trying to save a dollar because there is to many competitors in the market today pushing each other out of the marketplace and businesses just assume that customers will be around forever but in our “now” world that’s just not the case. And as we see more and more baby boomer retire, what will our world look like? We have to be prepared that it isn't going to look like the world we have today. I don't think companies trying to save money today are the companies going to be in business 10-15 years from now in our ever changing world regardless if it's from customer service or not having a correct marketing plan that includes a call center, correspondence team, website with live chat and social media. We need to be prepared for all of our generations as you can see, they are quite different then they ever have been and as our Generation Z grows into the workplace, I think we are going to have to be prepared to change our marketing strategies, which includes our customer experiences, overnight to avoid losing customers/clients.

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