Why Customer Service Ratings Are Deteriorating: NPR

A recent poll shows that Americans are more dissatisfied than ever with the quality of their customer service. The poor fellow above has been on hold for 24 months (we assume this is a stock photo).

Who are they? Thousands of Americans express their dissatisfaction with customer service. You can find them on almost any Yelp page.

  • The pandemic has upended many industries, and it turned out that customer service and hospitality in general have deteriorated in the eyes of many Americans.
  • 74% of Americans say they had a problem with a product or service in the past year, according to Issue 10 of the National Customer Anger Survey, which tracks satisfaction and rudeness. Since 1976, the number of problems has more than doubled.
  • And on the other hand, consumers are being described as getting more and more vocal about it – literally. The survey found that 43% of customers yelled or raised their voice to express dissatisfaction with their most serious issue, up from 35% in 2015.
  • If you’ve spent any time on the customer-infuriating TikTok side, you’ve probably seen enough to know that everything seems… wrong.
  • The survey is conducted by Customer Care Measurement and Consultancy in collaboration with the Center for Service Leadership/WP Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

Do you think? Well, there are a lot of unhappy people out there.

  • There are a number of reasons why customer service can be worse, such as a shortage of workers in some industries, the spread of technology as part of the process, and a lack of incentives for companies without competition. (Have you ever tried to contact your ISP about anything?)
  • Amas Tenuma has written a book on customer service, and he cites unmet customer expectations as the biggest part of the problem.
  • “Today we live in a society where expectations from brands are rising. Just think of commercials. They promise you the whole world… and here comes the objective reality. And you are trying to get through to the support service. with a bot. You meet waiting time… that’s where the real abyss is. This gap between expectations and objective reality keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

What do people say?

Tenuma is the author Waiting for Service: An insider’s story on why customer service isn’t working and tips on how to avoid bad service. He is also the founder of a management consulting firm and has spoken to NPR about what everyone seems to be unhappy about.

On how the role of technicians is more often frustrating than optimizing:

I’ll tell you, Americans are incredibly accommodating when they start. On a scale of 1 to 10, most people start at age nine or nine and a half.

But then you start that interaction and you’re greeted by an automated system – press one, press two – or the machine you’re trying to communicate with. They can’t understand you or you meet a chatbot on a website and then you go through it and then you give them your information.

And then you finally get to the person, and the person asks you to repeat your information. So, Your Grace started at nine. At that moment you were like a four, and then, God forbid, you will be transferred.

By the time you are transferred, having dealt with the car, repeating your information, you are at zero, and a lot of people are in the red. This is where the abuse and rage on the part of the client really escalates.

On how employee empowerment improves the experience for everyone:

It is still a matter of man to man. So, I tell clients that first and foremost, your first customers are help desk employees.

Make sure they have the right tools, they get the right compensation, and your policies and procedures don’t put them between you and the client.

That is why I encourage these organizations to empower this professional. You have trained them. You’ve invested in them so that when the client makes a reasonable request, they can just do it and be the hero. And the client does not need to ask the manager and escalate calls, and emails are transmitted powerfully.

Interested in learning more from Tenumah? Listen to the NPR interview by clicking the play button at the top.

And now what?

  • Despite the rise in AI-powered chatbots and automated customer service systems, Tenuma says customer service is a business that is extremely difficult to calculate with a formula or algorithm. Improving this system starts with employee evaluation.
  • “I usually say customer service is harder than rocket science. And the reason for that is because there are formulas that they can calculate. [to] send a rocket to the moon, there is no formula whereby two strangers can call the same phone to solve a problem.”
  • Tenuma says we need to change the social contract and not think of these employees as “low-skilled workers.” “These are complex requests, because if they were simple, they could be executed by a bot or a machine. And the faster we develop as an industry, the better it will be for us,” he said.

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