Whatever happened to customer service?
It takes a lot to rile me, but I’m also a Taurus. Whenever someone has the misfortune of pushing me past my limit, it can get messy for a while. It’s happened a few times, more frequently lately, even pre-Covid. It could be age-related, though that shouldn’t be an excuse. I’ve heard that older people have less patience. After all, who wants to die while waiting in a checkout line. But I have a different take. As I have gotten older the quality (or lack thereof) of customer service in some places I shop has gone from bad to abysmal.
Read my bio. I spent a good bit of my adult life working in retail, long enough to know that the adage of the customer is always right is absolute bullshit. And to an extent, extreme customers who have wanted to take advantage of stores’ pledges to put the customer first are to blame for some of the erosion. For 30 years I worked in retail management. I assure you customers are often wrong, not that it matters a whole lot in the balance. As a manager, I still needed to listen and try to see things from the customer’s perspective, if possible. If you don’t take care of your customers, you will lose them. Very likely they will tell from 5 to 8 people about their sad experience and each of those people will be less likely to shop at your store. A business will not survive for long by losing 5 to 8 customers every time there is a problem.
It might seem easy to blame the decline in customer service on Amazon and the lack of personalization rooted in the expansion of online shopping. But the long slide in customer service was well underway before the Internet exploded in the late ’90s and changed everything forever. Although I could tell you some horror stories about my interactions with Amazon, when compared to some stores I’ve dealt with in the past few years, they don’t seem quite so. The online divisions of traditional brick-and-mortar businesses are nothing to cheer about either. I can’t blame the lack of service on corporate culture except that most businesses, whether online or offline, seem reluctant to resolve the systemic and chronic issues they have.
One of the problems I have with Amazon is the allegation of mistreating their workers in their warehouses, and that's not to mention their delivery drivers. In support of their Prime model, the drivers are always in a rush and reportedly don’t even have the chance to take a restroom break. Maybe that’s why overall courtesy is lacking at times.
If companies are trying to give their employees the benefit of the doubt in cases of customer dissatisfaction, they need to weigh it against direct evidence of a pattern of problems. Some personality types have no business interfacing directly with customers. It takes a special mindset to tolerate the abuse of being on the front line. Most who work in retail for any length of time impressed me with their ability to compartmentalize their frustrations between work and home. Yet, there are also those employees to talk a great game to their managers while being the worst at talking to customers. As Brent Woods, a character in some of my novels is prone to say, “A turd is always a turd.”
Whenever I go shopping in a big box retailer, I’m there for the price, not the service. Let’s be honest, you are too. But still, I should be able to expect a modicum of common courtesy. I don’t expect assistance loading large boxes into my cart or onto my wagon. If I’m shopping for something large, it makes sense to bring your own service, a friend or relative, for that sort of thing. After all, what are you going to do with the large item once you get it home?
There are ways of creating the illusion of customer service in big box stores that don’t involve magic, smoke, and mirrors. It’s called putting a few bodies on the floor, telling them to walk the floor, and allowing them to interact with customers between accomplishing tasks on a worklist. It’s just the corporate bean counters with MBA degrees have proliferated in businesses ever since I was in college and they have made the strategic choice to skimp on staffing at the store level to maintain six-and-seven-digit incomes of those who populate the ivory tower. If those people who made the decisions to cut back on front-line employees earned their pay by fielding customer complaints from time to time, maybe things would improve in the stores. But I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one. It’s always easier to drop extra work on managers’ shoulders and let the front-line people figure out how to get it done.
The lack of customer service in large retailers and online should give rise to smaller shops, except their costs are higher and the prices are less attractive to those of us who count our pennies. Also, a lot of mom-and-pop establishments have closed permanently over the past couple of years due to lockdowns. But this could create an opportunity for those enterprising souls to create their own businesses to fill the gaps in our local economies to offset everything lacking about shopping online or at large retailers.
The key to success is offering levels of customer assistance not available anywhere else. Some customers will pay extra for personalized attention if it is delivered in a friendly, courteous way and at a fair price. Such small businesses make it worthwhile to support them. Small store owners who understand how to compete with big-box retailers, and even online behemoths like Amazon, know that you can survive by offering things the customer cannot get anywhere else.
