The rise and fall of customer service

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I entered the customer-service/research business in the early 1970s. At that time a movement was afoot to improve customer service, given the belief that increased sales and profits were tied to how well customers are served.

Customer-satisfaction surveys started becoming the vogue across business-to-business and consumer companies alike. And shortly after that, all sorts of other organizations started measuring customer satisfaction — government entities, nonprofit organizations, educational organizations, etc.

“Customer satisfaction” became the driving force of many of these entities. Then, in the 1990s, customer satisfaction morphed to “customer loyalty” with the assertion that more satisfied customers become more loyal ones.

Optimizing service to customers (however it’s called) consists of a few necessary steps. The first is determining what matters to customers and influences their decisions to deal with a given organization. The second step is measuring how well the needs of customers are being met. The third step is digging deeper to find the exact details underlying areas of dissatisfaction so they can be addressed — while expanding on things that lead to high satisfaction. The fourth step is putting into place a structure that creates doable action plans that build on strengths and address shortcomings. The fifth step is designating effective resources to implement the plans. And the sixth step is monitoring how effective the implemented plans are, abandoning ineffective ones, modifying ones that can be improved, and designing and implementing new ones where needed.

In summary, effective customer service consists of asking, “What is it our customers want, how well are we providing it, and what must we do to improve how well we meet customer needs?”

Collecting statistically reliable information to address this question can be tedious and is expensive — if done correctly. Yet during the 30 or so years after the customer-satisfaction movement began, leading organizations did put the time and resources into their efforts, and most of them reaped the benefits of more satisfied and profitable customers.

With the advent of advanced technology, organizations saw ways to reduce the costs of conducting surveys and reduce the time it takes to get customer feedback. These low-cost tactics have continued to the present and are what is behind the continuing “fall” of effective customer service. (“You call that customer service?” David Banks column, Jan. 12.)

With the internet available to most people, surveys have been largely conducted either by “email blasts” to large numbers of consumers or by recruiting “research panels” whereby people are rewarded in some way for completing surveys they receive via email. Although these methods are cheap and fast ways to collect customer feedback, those who complete such surveys are rarely representative of the entire customer base.

Ask yourself: “If I were offered $50 a year to complete one survey per week, would I do so?” And ask yourself: “If I bought a bar of soap over the internet and received an email survey asking how well I liked the soap, would I take the time to do the survey?”

The answers most people give to those questions is no. The consequence of conducting surveys this way is that valuable information from a representative group of customers is not obtained and, therefore, whatever is obtained is either not helpful or misleading and results in ineffective actions that do not improve customer service and satisfaction. The lesson is that reliable, valid feedback from customers must come from a representative sample of them — and getting such feedback is not inexpensive. The techniques for getting good data are known, and as noted earlier were used extensively in the latter parts of the 20th century.

Also, careful reviews of past research results reveal what truly is important to customers. And it’s surprising how those results are in many cases just ignored.

A detailed 2010 study conducted by Consumer Review Systems, which resulted in “The Yellow Pages Report: A Comprehensive Guide for Advertisers,” found that the most important information people seek when scanning through yellow-pages ads to decide from whom to purchase are (1) “Why should I deal with you rather than one of your competitors?” and (2) “How do I deal with you?” Answers to these two questions involve such basic things as letting people know credentials of an organization, free trials offered, guarantees, pricing, hours the organization is open, geographic and email addresses and phone numbers. This should not be surprising, because these are all things that make it easy for people to do business.

Fancy things, like color in advertising, are way less effective in attracting customers because they do not convey how to interact with the organization being considered — i.e., it does not make their experience easier. Although consulting the Yellow Pages is far less common these days, the same factors of “why” and “how” drive internet searches, billboards and other forms of advertising.

The immediate and lingering effects of COVID also have caused customer service to plummet. People have retired early, and for a variety of related reasons there are not enough employees to serve customers — across almost all industries. When my wife and I flew from Minneapolis to Bordeaux last summer, our bags were to have been transferred in Amsterdam. They were not transferred in time to catch our flight, and when we landed in Bordeaux there was not a single person in the baggage area we could even consult about the missing bags! And when my wife went to the airline website, it contained a message that basically said, “If you’re inquiring about missing baggage, don’t!”

When customer service fails and does not even give customers an option to find out what’s going on, that is a real decline from years past.

On our return flight to Minneapolis, I requested the “featured cocktail” and was told it was not available because the needed supplies had not even been delivered.

Our condominium remodeling project has been hit with delay after delay — all because of supply-chain issues exacerbated by labor shortages. When inquiring about when things will get done, we’re told, “We’ll let you know when we know.” And these labor shortages have affected all industries. I recently sent a certified letter to a person located in the same city in which the letter was mailed and, via diligent tracking, was able to determine it had taken 12 days to be delivered.

I suspect labor shortages are also behind the failure of websites to be updated as needed. When one visits a restaurant’s website and the site says the establishment is open — and lists the hours in a way as to imply it will be open for another four hours — and then one drives 30 minutes to get to the restaurant and finds it is closed, that is very disheartening and almost ensures that restaurant will not be visited again. I’ve had that “failure to update websites” problem across a variety of industries, including insurance companies, health care providers, retail banks, grocery stores, etc.

Anyone who’s tried to contact a service provider via its 800 number likely will have encountered other customer-service problems. After wading through long introductory messages about which keys to press for which problems (none of which usually addresses the reason for one’s call), you either get disconnected or told it’ll be up to two hours (or more) before a representative can speak with you, so you may want to call back later (at which time, of course, you get the same message).

When I first entered the customer-service consulting field years ago, a colleague told me about an event he’d seen in which a customer confronted a particularly unfriendly and unhelpful employee. The customer said, “You may want to always remember that in the eyes of your employer you represent overhead expense and I represent profit.” For customer service to return to the esteemed levels it was at not that long ago, both employers and employees would be well-served to remember those words. Customers interact with organizations because they want or need a product or service. And they want their experience to be as pleasant and fast as possible. Refocusing on the well-known tenets of customer service will benefit the organizations that do so and, certainly, the customers they serve.

So, upfront (in ads, websites, etc.), make clear: (1) what services/products you provide, (2) what your hours are — if in-person visits are required, and (3) how customers can easily contact an actual person to get answers to questions they may have. Then focus your efforts on delivering what you promise to deliver. Doing these things, although not always simple, is possible if one is focused on the customer and committed to providing superior service.

As far as customer research goes, it should take four phases: (1) in-depth conversations with current, past and potential customers to identify why they act as they do, (2) measuring across the customer base how well those reasons are being addressed, (3) forming action teams to identify how to address the shortcomings that exist, and (4) continued measurements to fine-tune needed actions.

These steps used to be commonplace, and organizations should return to them if they want to prosper and provide what people want and need.

Doug R. Berdie, of Minneapolis, is a retired marketing/social research professional who co-authored the text “Questionnaires: Design and Use” and has taught survey research techniques.