YETMO

“How Service Turned Severe”

Sometimes all you can do is laugh.

Beginning about a decade ago, and lasting for only a few years, companies were making customer service a priority. All anyone cared about was service. Whether one was dealing with a private corporation or the government, all clients were called “customers,” and the businesses and agencies were putting out the Red Carpet for all of us. It was wonderful. We were valued. Alleluia!

Boy, have things changed. Nowadays, companies and government offices could care less if your interactions with them are timely, courtesy, effective, or accurate. My theory is that the customer base has grown so large that these organizations have concluded that it’s not cost effective to spend the additional time and money to prevent you from taking your business elsewhere. Sometimes, there is no other viable competitor to use. Or the companies will make prices so attractive that they are confident that any loss of customers will be more than offset by new ones coming through the door.

In short, my theory is that companies no longer consider customer service a sensible business investment. If helping customers doesn’t add to their bottom line, they will cease. Altruistic motives, if they ever existed, have long fallen by the wayside.

That sounds very cynical, you may say. And you’re right. But it’s supported by anecdotal information daily. Most recently, my 13-year-old son ran into the customer non-service buzz saw. He was trying to replace a Palm product. When he called for assistance, he learned that he could handle one part of his complaint at one particular telephone number, but had to make a separate call to a different number to deal with another aspect. He received unique control numbers for each contact, and one case identifier was an eight-digit alpha code that was “case sensitive!” Do you know how many combinations and permutations that represents? Neither do I, for sure, but if I recall my Junior High School math correctly, that’s 52 to the 8th power, which may be roughly equal to the number of grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. Egad!

So, you see. Customer service is and has been backsliding in front of our very eyes. Clearly, companies do not want to hear from us in any way, shape, or form, after we have purchased their goods or services.

If you’d like to read a humorous fantasy story about American customer service, please read this, although it seems in this case that art more nearly resembles reality, especially given my son’s recent real-life experience.