Posted on: Sunday, September 28, 2003
Firms leave customer service on hold
By Bruce Horovitz
USA Today
Ron Kaufman was the absolute wrong guy to put on hold.
About a half-hour later, a frustrated Kaufman hung up. Then, the international customer service consultant — and author of "Up Your Service!" — took matters into his own hands. He signed off his laptop and marched to a travel agency down the street where a real person booked the $9,000 trip.
His advice to folks who make online travel bookings with even a remote possibility of future changes: Forget it. "Book it with a human," he says.
But where to find that human?
There was a time when companies actually employed people whose jobs were to help customers. They were called operators. Or customer service agents. Or salespeople. But it's rarely people who help people anymore. It's machines. And computers. And automated recordings. Result: Customer-service complaints are on the rise — even though many complaints never actually reach a human being.
"If it gets any uglier," says Bob Chatham, principal analyst at Forrester, a high-tech research specialist, "companies may be (legally) forced to disclose to consumers how to reach a human being."
Until then, many companies will continue to reduce workforce and invest in software that doesn't need a weekly paycheck, health insurance or paid vacation. American companies will spend a record $8.5 billion on call center software this year, estimates Datamonitor, a corporate research and consulting firm.
With good reason. The typical service phone call — involving a real person — costs a company $7. An Internet transaction, with a person responding, costs $2.25. But a self-service phone call — with no human interaction — costs less than 50 cents, says Lance Fried, marketing director at TelephonyAtWork, a call center vendor.
Just how badly has the nation's customer service degraded?
• On the phone. Some 80 percent of the nation's companies still haven't figured out how to do a decent job getting customers the assistance they need, says Jon Anton, who oversees Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality and is research director at the consulting firm BenchmarkPortal. • Online. Some 35 percent of all e-mail inquiries to companies don't get a response within seven days, according to industry estimates. And about 25 percent never get a response at all, Forrester estimates. • In "IVR" hell. To save on labor costs, many of America's largest companies have installed software that the industry calls Interactive Voice Response systems or IVR. Yet more than 90 percent of financial service consumers say they don't like these systems, Forrester reports. • In a rage. Nearly one in three customers say they have raised their voices at customer service reps and nearly one in 10 say they have cursed at them over the past year, according to a national phone survey by Customer Care Measurement & Consulting. Service matters. Services of all types — from getting new hairdos to fixing computer snafus — accounted for $4.5 trillion of the $10.7 trillion that consumers spent in just the second quarter of 2003.
But go ahead: Just try to get human-to-human service in this service economy. The key to receiving special attention: Rank among the company's top 25 percent biggest-spending customers, experts say.
This is the fastest-growing sector of customer service: select customer service. It can be antagonizing to the masses.
When customers do tasks themselves, companies save megadollars on labor. That's why many big companies are nudging consumers to do it themselves.
The three most consistent offenders: airlines, personal computer makers and cable TV companies.
"Maybe we've hit bottom," says Claes Fornell, the business professor who oversees the index. "A company's basic asset is its relationship with its customers."
All he wanted was to talk to a real person to get help making a major change to his business-class tickets to London. But Expedia put him on hold. That was just the beginning of his journey into phone hell. The kindly operator who finally tried to help was, in turn, put on hold by yet another employee. Kaufman suddenly found himself in a double holding pattern.
