Customer Service Is an Oxymoron

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Jan 1, 2001 | by Timothy W. Maier

Linda Talley, a Houston-based business coach and author of Business Finesse: Dealing With Sticky Situations in the Workplace for Managers, says people need to complain to the right people. "We might complain on the Net in such locations as Yahoo or opinions, but we don't do it to the producer." Some do and some don't. The trouble is that soon it might be hard to complain even to a clerk in this age of self-service marketing. Like it or not, the service industry has borrowed a page from the manufacturing plant and is moving toward automation with self-service scanners and computerized machines that act as virtual salespeople. The new McDonald's restaurants have turned the computerized selection board toward the customer where they are expected to pick food options, and self-scanner lines have appeared in grocery chains on the East Coast. Businesses say customers will get used to it just as they did to pumping their own gas and doing their banking at an ATM.

Maybe not. Retail cyberservice was born the day after Thanksgiving last year. "People were waiting in lines but they couldn't cash out the product," says Gronbach. "The baby boomers wanted to be served. Boomers mostly pay for the product with cash, and when they found it was too much effort to cash out they just said, `No sweat, I won't do it.' They walked out of the store and ordered online."

There remain kinks in online service as well, mainly because suppliers have had trouble keeping up with demand. However, more customers are satisfied with shopping online than standing in line, according to ACSI, which scored online experience five points higher than the retail average at 78. This prompted traditional stores to offer service incentives, such as free delivery and/or installation, says Richard Laermer, chief executive officer of New York-based RLM, an e-commerce public-relations outfit. "They have to offer service in order to keep up with the online stores," he says. And online stores will have to boast that they have customer service to get customers, Laermer adds.

It remains to be seen how many online stores can deliver products instead of sending out apologies with gift certificates -- which requires a lot less wrapping paper but spoils Christmas for a child looking forward to playing with a new toy. "That was deemed a failure" Laermer says. "But what is overlooked is the number of hassle-flee returns that online companies offered with no standing in line."

True, but those lines moved to the package-mailing window at the post office -- which, by the way, scored a 72 on the ACSI for a C-. Either way, the customer can't seem to win.