Do you pride yourself over your excellent customer service department?

Might be time to rethink the model. According to a recent Harvard Business Review Post, (thanks to a link on opensources.com)

Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live.

I have noticed this in myself. I would rather go to the effort of logging onto my credit card website rather than simply calling the 800 number. Upon thinking back, here are the reasons I don’t like interacting with a human customer service rep.

  • Wait Time: Much of the frustration with customer service is the wait time. I would rather wait for myself than wait for somebody else, even if that somebody else is much faster.
  • Bad experience: In general, we are used to customer service personnel being bored, slow and generally knowledgeable. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”, they ask. Of course there are but we can’t wait to hang up.
  • Control: As consumers like me get used to controlling and even creating their media-rich environment, autonomy builds. It feels like I have more control if I can swipe my own ice cream at Albertsons.
  • Ego: For whatever reason, if I can locate the answer to my question online, I feel that it is I who have solved the problem (of course it isn’t). If I have to resort to a phone call or in-person question, that means I couldn’t handle it on my own.

As a balancing side note, I find it interesting that my reluctance to deal with support personnel does nothing to diminish my reliance upon those I consider to be true experts. I may check out my own ice cream but in no case will I attempt to perform self heart surgery on myself.