The (d)Evolution of Customer Service

Some of us are old enough to remember one-on-one, in-person customer service. You could walk into a bank and talk to a bank teller who knew you and knew how to solve whatever problem you might have.

Today, the most sophisticated banks offer free espresso and wifi, but not a teller in sight. As for those old school banks that still have tellers, you will need to schedule an appointment and be prepared to pay for the experience. Thank you Capital One and Bank of America for your customer-first mentality.

How did customer service evolve to the current state? It has been a never ending process of taking real human interaction out of the equation.

Many decades ago, companies turned to telephone-based customer service in order to cut costs as well as corners. In addition to being a more efficient way to keep customers at arms length, it made it harder for irate customers to physically assault their service reps.

In the early days of telephone service, you could generally find someone who had some idea of what your problem was and how to solve it. As companies continue to produce ever more complicated products and services, the service end of things got a bit more challenging. It was hard for the telephone-based service tech to keep up with the ever more complex and buggy devices. Many of the questions could only be answered by the engineer who actually designed the device, except that engineers never document anything they do for reasons of job security. As service became a drain on valuable technical resources, companies found another compelling solution: outsource it to the other side of the world.

Now there is nothing wrong with offshore call centers per se, but staff do need to be trained on at least a few relevant topics. The common solution is to provide staff with a pile of product manuals and hope for the best. The fact that most of the product documentation was produced by contractors in China who had never even seen the product in question just adds another level of abstraction.

Armed with this level of support, most service reps can answer most frequently asked question except yours. They will dutifully log your question, issue a support ticket, and ask for a favorable review on the inevitable customer satisfaction survey. In the unlikely event that you are able to connect with someone who might have the answer, you will immediately be placed on hold for the next week or so.

Cable TV and Mobile Phone companies perfected yet another innovation in telephone support known as the service menu. Press 1 for new accounts, 2 for old accounts, 3 for billing, 4 for recipes, 5 for existing problems, 6 for new problems, 7 to go back to the beginning, and 8 to be transferred to a suicide hotline.

A final diversionary tactic is the automated voice system that tells you it wants to collect a bit of information from you in order to provide a better service experience. You carefully punch in your name, DOB, account number, next of kin, age, race, sexual orientation and what your particular problem might be. Once you have waited the obligatory 2 hours on hold, the cheerful service rep that answers the phone has no idea who you are or why you called.

Thankfully there is a new gold standard in customer service. This cutting edge strategy is to eliminate human interaction all together. The key insight here is that if you can eliminate all human interaction, you can also eliminate the entire Service Department as well. The modern Service Department exists only in cyberspace as a set of chatbots, AIs, and other widgets designed to frustrate you until can’t remember what your problem was in the first place. And rest assured, the software developer that “trained” these virtual technicians are at least as capable as the developers who wrote the buggy software you are calling about.

In the future, all service will be conducted online. You will be connected to some sort of chatbot. Ignore the smiling Avatar on your screen, there is no human being on the other end. It is an IA that offers up an answer that has nothing to do with your question. You may try to outsmart it by rephrasing your question, but it can’t be fooled into providing a useful answer. Once it has served up the same answer several times, it will ask you if you found what you were looking for. The most brazen bot will even ask you to take a customer satisfaction survey just in case it has not already wasted enough of your time.

I may be cranky but I miss that old fashion human contact. If you disagree, don’t call. Just send me a text.