Searching for customer service

Kane was therefore surprised by several recent encounters with "rude, uninformative" employees of national telephone and finance companies she had called with questions about billing discrepancies.

"These were not the kind of people you’d expect to be in the customer service arena," Kane said. "In any position you deal with the public, you have to have some sort of tolerance. But they were really rather cold."

Increasingly, Americans say, the customer service they receive ranges from rude, at best, to simply nonexistent. Businesses say a growing national economy that fosters an instant-gratification culture and a chronic shortage of quality workers has hindered efforts to cater to customers.

In Hawai’i, observers say customers sometimes are being treated worse for the opposite reason: Hard times in the 1990s forced businesses to cut some corners, and the effects on service are still being felt.

All sides, however, agree on one thing: In today’s service economy, service just isn’t what it used to be.

"There has been a deterioration of service," said Eugene Fram, a professor of marketing at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

"It’s deteriorated significantly in certain areas like retail. You can see it at busy times like around the Christmas period."

No industry spared

Poor service seems to plague almost every industry that counts service as its main mission. Travelers complain of vague and uncaring airline attendants, late flights and lost luggage. Bank account and credit-card holders fume over being trapped in a voice-mail maze, never to connect to a real person.

In Hawai‘i, complaints to the Better Business Bureau topped 9,000 last year, said Anne Deschene, president of the watchdog organization. That’s about triple the level of complaints made in 1995.

Nationwide, the Council of Better Business Bureaus said it processed more than 3 million complaints in 1999, about a 10 percent increase from 1998 and about 2 1/2 times the number in 1995.

The Hawai’i complaints are troubling not only in number, but also in origin: Hawai‘i hospitality industry complaints are on the rise, and now rival those made to that perennial target, the automobile sales, service and repair industry, Deschene said.

"Most of the hospitality companies here are doing an exemplary job, but they’re getting a black eye for a lot of stuff that’s the fault of others, particularly airlines or tour providers," she said.

Overall, the poor-service trend needs to be reversed, experts said. A lot is riding on it: "Service includes almost half of the economy," said Claes Fornell, director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a quarterly survey conducted by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The Michigan economists began watching customer satisfaction levels in 1994. The past six years have showed a mixed result. As the nation’s economy settled into its now record-breaking session, the survey reported, service suffered.

"From 1994 to 1997, the quality of service got worse and worse," Fornell said.

While satisfaction levels have risen slightly from their lows four years ago, he noted, those levels have not met the ratings of 1994.

It’s not that customer service belongs to a bygone era, businesses say. Today’s economy makes such catering difficult.

"We are expecting pretty instant gratification," said Eileen O’Neill Odum, Verizon Communications Inc.’s president of national operations.

Internet makes customers more demanding

Companies say today’s 24-hour Land of Always Open and free-flowing information on the Internet has made consumers more demanding. The prosperity created in the go-go 1990s has allowed people to eat out, fly and buy stuff to their heart’s content, stressing businesses’ ability to deliver, economists say.

So, is service really bad or are we just expecting too much?

"Expectations have never been higher in our history," said Tom Barry, professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University. "There are disproportionately more people demanding those services than ever before."

With a U.S. unemployment rate at or near record lows — and Hawai‘i’s rate of 3.6 percent in December — simply finding employees is difficult.

"The people that usually provide service are the lowest-level employees in the organization," said Stephen Brown, an SMU economist. "They are paid the least, have the least qualifications and receive the least training."

In Hawai’i, the situation is reversed, the Better Business Bureau’s Deschene said.

"Money has been scarce for the past five years, and businesses have been laying off people, cutting back on training, and hiring at lower levels," she said. "What you get from that is a company loaded with really junior people who really don’t plan to make a career of it, often left alone, sometimes without supervision, and with serious attitude.

"The company may have the best intentions in the world, but that noncareer person in the front line is the one making the impression on customers."

Some businesses are beginning to recognize that poor service does have a price and can affect their bottom lines, especially in a slowing economy where consumers become tighter with their dollars.

"Loyal customers will pay more and tell their friends about it," said Roberta Nedry, president of Hospitality Excellence Inc., a consultancy that advises companies on customer service . "It costs six to eight times more to get a new customer than to keep the ones you’ve got."

For example, the National Retail Federation has opened three retail sales centers in malls across the country within the last five years to teach new employees the art of service.

Work-force commissions, high schools and others have adopted such training to help "professionalize" the retail industry, said Pamela Rucker, the retail federation’s vice president for public relations.

"We do care," Rucker said. "Customer service is what generally separates one retailer from the next. It’s the key to loyalty."

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