Superficial Changes Abound For Customer Service, But Few Bottom Line Changes
Experts in customer service, often self proclaimed, and customer advocates feel that technological changes – primarily social media, but also others, have changed the nature of customer service in this millennium.
However if you look at fundamentals, whether service has improved, and customer satisfaction, the picture is entirely different.
In fact, customer satisfaction with customer service generally tells us that most of us feel that service has stayed the same or gotten worse, even though technology has brought about different ways to interact with customers.
While customer contacts have changed on a more superficial basis, and customers now have louder voices (but with few listening), companies are still guided by the exact same principles.
These principles are embedded in our economic system and include:
- One must maximize shareholder returns.
- One must constantly keep labor costs as low as possible.
- One should minimize the cost of labor by hiring part time staff.
- One should reduce the costs of training staff.
These fundamentals haven’t changed the quality of service available, and will operate to keep the quality of customer service poor, regardless of superficial changes in how customers contact companies or whether they can make a lot of noise when unhappy.
