Is it you?
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RichVintage/Getty Images
Is it you?
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A recent survey shows that Americans are more dissatisfied with the customer service they receive than ever before. The poor guy above has been on hold for 24 months (we assume – it’s a stock photo).
Who are they? The thousands of Americans who express their dissatisfaction with customer service. You can find them on pretty much every Yelp site out there.
- Lots of industries have been upended by the pandemic, and it turns out that customer service and hospitality in general have fallen in the eyes of many Americans.
- 74% of Americans say they’ve had a product or service problem in the past year, according to the 10th edition of the National Customer Rage Survey, which tracks satisfaction and incivility. The incidence of problems has more than doubled since 1976.
- And on the other hand, consumers are described as increasingly vocal about it – literally. The survey found that 43% of customers shouted or raised their voice to express displeasure about their most serious problem, up from 35% in 2015.
- If you’ve spent any time on the rage-inducing side of customer freakout TikTok, you’ve probably seen enough to know that things feel… off.
- The study was conducted by Customer Care Measurement and Consultancy in collaboration with the Center for Services Leadership/WP Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
Turn the pan upside down.
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Turn the pan upside down.
Carol Yepes/Getty Images
What’s the big deal? Well, there are a lot of unhappy people out there.
- There are a number of reasons why customer service can feel worse, such as a lack of workers in some industries, the proliferation of technology as part of the process, and a lack of incentive for businesses without competition. (Have you ever tried to contact your internet provider regarding anything?)
- Amas Tenumah wrote a book on the subject of customer service, and he cites increased customer expectations that were not met as the biggest part of the problem.
- “Today we live in a society where expectations rise from brands. Just think about the commercials. They promise you the world … and then objective reality hits. And you try to reach customer service. And you’re met with a bot. You being met with wait times … that’s really where the gap is. This gap between expectations and objective reality is just getting wider and wider.”
What are people saying?
Tenumah is the author of Waiting for Service: An Insider’s Account of Why Customer Service Is Broken and Tips for Avoiding Bad Service. He’s also the founder of a management consulting firm and spoke to NPR about what everyone seems to be unhappy about.
On how the role of technology often frustrates more than it optimizes:
I have to tell you, Americans are incredibly gracious when they start. If it’s on a scale of 1 to 10, most people start at nine or nine and a half.
But then you start this interaction and you’re met with an automated system – press one, press two – or a machine you’re trying to communicate with. They can’t understand you, or you’re met with a chatbot on the website, and then you get past that, and then you give them your information.
And then you finally get to a human and the human asks you to repeat your information. Now your grace began at nine o’clock. At this point you were like a four and then, god forbid, they transfer you.
By the time you are transferred, after handling the machine, repeating your information, you are at zero, and many people are in the negative. This is where the abuse and rage really escalates on the part of the customer.
About how employee empowerment makes for a better experience for everyone:
It is still a human business. And so what I tell customers is, first of all, your first customers are your service people.
Make sure they have the right tools, they’re compensated appropriately, and your policies and procedures don’t put them between you and the customer.
So that is why I encourage these organizations to strengthen the professional. You have trained them. You’ve invested in them, so when the customer makes a reasonable request, they can just fulfill it and they can be a hero. And the customer does not need to ask for a manager and escalate the calls and emails are transferred to the power.
Want to hear more from Tenumah? Listen to the NPR interview by clicking or tapping the play button above.
Now what?
- Despite the rise of AI chatbots and automated customer service systems, Tenumah says customer service is a business that is extremely difficult to calculate with a formula or algorithm. Improving this system starts with valuing workers.
- “I usually say that customer service is harder than rocket science. And the reason it’s harder is because there are formulas they can calculate [to] putting a rocket on the moon, there is no formula for putting two strangers on the same phone call to solve a problem.”
- Tenumah says we need to change the social contract and not think of these workers as “low-skilled workers.” “These are complicated requests because if they were easy, a bot or a machine could do it. And the faster we evolve as an industry, the better we’ll be,” he said.
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