The Grasshopper thinks, or at least would like to think, that a customer service resurrection is coming. Post-pandemic, we’re all now living in a society where customer service has been slaughtered by the poleaxed twin towers of the new work-from-home (a.k.a. barely-works-at-all) culture and a crumbling telecommunications network that renders any call with waits of longer than 30 minutes (i.e. all of them) guaranteed to get the telephonic equivalent of the blue screen of death. In other words, our old friend customer service has curled up its tootsies and gone to meet its maker.
But why do we expect good customer services from our banks, utility companies, local governments, online shopping sites yada yada yada, anyway? Once again, America’s to blame. They got good at it during the last century, you see, while jolly old Britain was still having fun with three-day weeks and winters of discontent. Then we woke up on this side of The Pond and said, ‘Hang on, we should get some of that!’. And lo! it became so. America totally lost its service culture after 9/11, of course, as it disappeared up its own bumhole looking for dodgy chaps (and some women) with fist-length beards. But we hung on a few more years until the crunch of 2008, the general apathy of the 2010s and now, the pandemic, totally killed it off.
Disagree? Try talking to your bank about something as simple as ordering a new card for your account. Better still, try a call where you want a couple of things doing, like getting enrolled for online banking AS WELL AS ordering a new card. Once you’ve got through the thousands of press-1-for-oblivion options, cringed as they tell you it’s better if you do this online, sworn when they tell you the call is being recorded for training purposes, blurted ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘maybe’ to all their voice-lack-of-recognition twists and turns, and then waited an additional 30 mins listening to Sinead O’Connor on a loop, you’ve pretty much lost the will to live. And then, oh, the line drops, start all over again. AND THEN FINALLY…
…the oik at the other ends means well, of course. He/she/it (sorry, they) is as dispirited as you, nobody wants to be friends with him/her/it/them and just shouts at him/her/it/them instead. It’s just that there are so many ‘teams’ to deal with. There’s a ‘team’ for security clearance, another ‘team’ for ordering a new card, another ‘team’ – oops, sorry, two – for (a) online banking access and (b) finding you a dongle, another ‘team’ for compliance to keep an eye on the dangerous intellectuals in the other ‘teams’…
…and so it goes on.
The G. has previously posted about the incessant drive to specialise, specialise, specialise in today’s world and the desperate need for interdisciplinarity instead. This loss of customer service is specialisation’s evil twin brother – reductionism – in action. By making businesses ever more granular, local bottlenecks eventually grind the whole system to a halt. While the South of England Business Banking Online Access team is going mad with panic at the backlog of calls building up, the Orkney Dairy Farmers New Loan Applications team is going equally mad with boredom.
But here’s where the Lazarus effect might kick in. In The Grasshopper’s opinion, it would only take one or two players in each sector to think holistically and let their people do more than just one thing. Say, process new card applications AND set up online banking access. That would smooth the local bottlenecks and trim out the fishbones. And also give customers a warm feeling that they’re dealing with a person and not just an amorphous blob of ‘teams’. Better still, get these new, marvellous multi-talented people out of their working-from-home equivalent of back street abortionists’ clinics and back into the front-of-house.
If one or two businesses do that, customers will vote with their feet and the others will have to follow. And customer service will rise like a p. from the a’s. Who knows, we might even see the sartorial return of that other much-missed fellow, the necktie!