Why can’t more companies be geared towards customer satisfaction, sincerely? All customer service is geared towards satisfying their customers superficially but just below the surface, it’s all about internal metrics not customers. If satisfied customers are the net product of highly trained customer service reps, then nearly all customer service teams are operating at a huge financial loss. But why? Like I said, it’s not about customers despite the name. Almost everyone that’s had a job has been a CSR — customer service representative — at one point or another, I’ve been one for the last 13 years in various forms and under various names. Job descriptions aside, every job in every company is a CSR position to some degree. So why is most customer service just so darned awful? One word: metrics. Helping customers with their issues, big and small, is about applying band-aids because nearly all customer service requests are reactive in nature and get sprinkled with proactive measures here and there. Proactive measures can take on the allegorical form of many things: bigger band-aids, sledgehammers, miracle fixes, and so on.
I’m going to refer to customer service centers as call centers since that’s what they all are anyway, in any various form. Call centers see customers as cattle, the more you get in and out the door in a shift, the better you’re doing your job. This is evidenced by the fact that, in a call center, everything is done for you and you’re just a conduit through which information flows. When you come to work, your break times are planned out for you, your necessary documentation and information is already neatly prepared for you, every minutiae is laid out for you so you can leave your brain behind; yes this does not apply for every position but I’m generalizing.
Take my own job for example: mail/sys admin. I do boring doldrum work everyday, much of it with very little thought given to the processes I do each day, hundreds of times a day. I make very few decisions on my own because I’m not a “manager” so I get to ask someone to make them for me. I type out the same responses to emails nearly 130 times a day, everyday and I’ve long forgotten to think about what I’m writing but I do know it’s a blend of what managers tell me what customers want to hear and what I have to really want to say. I take my lunch at mostly the same time, in line with our schedule and I hardly ever take the full lunch break. Since I work at home and not at a call center any longer, parts of my day go “unscripted” such as the fact that I eat breakfast while mulling over spam or I’ll read a book when work is slow (since, again, I can’t make decisions to be proactive). Most people aren’t this lucky. My job is to be as reactive to problems as I can be, my company cares nothing about proactive measures to help make a customer’s experience with our company better, trust me I’ve tried almost everyday for the last 16 months. They just won’t have it. And what do our customers have to say about our support in general? Most of them think it sucks and regularly vocalize it to our company, which is an unfortunate waste of time for them since nothing will come of their complaints. My job, along with nearly every other position in the company requires little more than a pulse and the ability to speak English and write in English, but no promises about how well either are done. I can plow right through an entire day’s worth of work in just a few hours, providing pretty bad customer service and I won’t get into trouble. It’s when I start thinking outside the box that I do get in trouble, I’m seen as a thinker and not a doer, and thinking doesn’t get my job done. Again, my company is about shuffling cattle through not making sure they’re satisfied. This really bothers me, a lot. So much so that I’ve long forgone pleasantry and let what I really want to say out and of course, no one in upper management likes it but amazingly (note the sarcasm), the customers like when I’m frank and upfront. I’m not the only person that sees it but I’m the only one who doesn’t play office politics to get my message across. More bees with honey, I know but these bees are especially dense bees. I used to find it amazing that a manager who acts in much the same way I do is heralded for their efforts in keeping customers “in line” and “enforcing policies” and I’m just called a bad apple. My last job was pretty close to this same environment but in a thin veil of academics and a lot more money being bandied about by customers. The problem with both jobs wasn’t that I wasn’t saying the right things to the right people, I was saying the right things to people who didn’t have the means to be heard by anyone that wanted to do anything. Ivory towers and all that.
Every job I’ve been in has basically been like this, with small adjustments here and there. But why? Why are we still treating customers like sheep even though there are people specially trained to tell employees to not treat customers like sheep. Scads of customers complain about companies day in and day out while the companies swear to improve customer service and take it “very seriously” while they keep doing the same ol’ thing. Many times when an employee thinks outside the box to actually help a customer, they are regaled endlessly by that customer only to be reprimanded by their supervisor, more than likely for “affecting the bottom line”. You get this speech because they’re worried about their numbers — again, those damn metrics — not about customers and always have the same retorts for explaining that without happy customers there is no bottom line. The one I’ve heard pretty often is “Being nice doesn’t pay the bills but being enough does.”
Is that all we’re supposed to be, “enough”? When will managers and analysts realize that cattle-pushing employees are also part of the herd and we like to talk about our jobs to other people. I relish each time I walk into a Mom-n-Pop store only to be treated like a prince even if I don’t buy anything. Each time I walk into a big box electronics store, if I’m not dragging bags of money in I’m just another cow being pushed and prodded by someone who probably hates their job — which has been vocalized to me on more than one occasion.
Why do companies applaud themselves for good customer service when they have angry customers beating down their doors? When will it stop?
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1 response so far ↓
Excellent post sir. You pretty much summed up why working in our line of work can be so exasperating a lot of the time. The problem lies especially with manager who have never been in the customer’s or the support person’s position and still they make decisions as if they have the faintest idea of what the customer wants.
Of course, that is also a problem with the customers who further than expressing their displeasure, don’t take their money elsewhere as well