Will Service Still Stink?

(2 of 3)

Help yourself, to everything.

Self-service improves service by getting rid of it. Total self-service would have the etiquette advantages of eliminating opportunities to be rude and removing incentive for issuing blame. More important, it could make customer service into a noble profession serving the unfortunate. Not only will people who can't fix their own computer problems be even more pitiful than they are now, but the ability to help them, which will require experience in dealing with people who are actually present in the flesh, will be even rarer.

It is the general attitude toward those who serve that explains why customer-service problems, far from being a recent phenomenon, are inherent in an egalitarian society. If everyone is equal, why should one person wait on another? Never mind that the answer ought to be that all of us should do that in one way or another and that public service is our highest calling. (Public service that comes with private dining rooms is another matter.)

True, everyone knows there was a time when customer service was better than it is now, but that was not because people used to be humbler. It was because consultants weren't available to "fix" service problems. Consultants made people who had been reasonably content working in customer service turn disgruntled with their lot, and deeply annoyed people who had been reasonably content with the level of service they had been receiving.

The first such fix was "The customer is always right," innocently intended to convey the idea that efforts should be made to please even unreasonable customers. But whoever invented it does not seem to have considered the question of why anyone would be happy doing a job in which he or she was condemned to be always in the wrong. Nor does this bring out the best in the customers whom it was intended to attract with the promise of being judged right, notwithstanding any evidence to the contrary.

The next was "friendly service." This was another well-meant concept, the idea being to assure the customer that the service would not be surly. Those who launched it didn't realize that the opposite of surly, in a business context, is not friendly but cheeky. What was really meant was cheerfulness, not the license of friendship to unburden oneself, which sometimes includes not having to keep up a cheerful front. And aside from the question of why those friendly banks ran away leaving their friends in the care of machines, there is the small matter of people wanting to choose their own friends.

Related to this is "personal service," meant to tailor the service to the requirements of the individual. But as this was applied in situations in which altering the service for every customer was not possible, it was pretty much confined to reading customers' first names from their credit cards and reciting them back to them. Lately, however, it has come to mean keeping track of their purchases as a way of enticing them to keep right on purchasing.

Improved customer service will probably have to wait a decade for the realization that what the customer wants is fairness, efficiency and privacy. Meanwhile, customers who want to be righteous in sharing personal experiences with friendly strangers can turn to chat groups that deal with complaints about customer service. : )