"The customer is king."
"The customer is always right."
"Customer experience is paramount."
These are phrases we still hear on a regular basis in 2022. A decade or two ago, they meant something and were the ethos by which many small businesses operated, helping many of them grow from minuscule, home-based family ventures into swollen, multinational conglomerates that now dominate their respective sectors.
Today, these phrases ring hollow. They are empty and meaningless platitudes, particularly if one is dealing with one of the well-established monopolies, e.g. Amazon or Microsoft. These companies are now so vast and widespread, so inflexible, a one-size-fits-all approach is all they can manage. And if that one-size-fits-all approach results in disappointment, the most you can expect is a refund and a poorly scripted reparation, which is more likely to have been generated by AI than written by a human being.
We increasingly use these bloated platforms for the sake of pure convenience, at the expense of the personal touch. I am as guilty of this as anyone - my Amazon bill each month is sometimes shameful. What is concerning about this trend, at least from my perspective, is the continuing normalization of bad - or non-existent - customer service.
It stands to reason that a large corporation will only spend x amount of money on customer services, which are almost always disproportionately scaled up in relation to the rest of the organization. This is the "cost" to the end customer for the (usually) faster turnaround times and lower prices. However, if this drop in standards becomes normalized and small-to-medium enterprises start cutting corners in the same way, we are heading into dangerous waters - both as business owners and consumers.
Just from the last few months of my life, I can quote a handful of shockingly bad customer experiences. These are just the ones I can recall off the top of my head:
- Last week I tried to report a bug to LinkedIn, as a professional courtesy. It wasn't something that bothered me or impacted the functionality of the UI, it was just an annoying visual glitch. The resulting conversation with an appallingly trained "support" person was painful to say the least. I might as well have been trying to communicate the esoteric secrets of cold fusion technology to him. The result: I gave up and the unsightly issue persists (for 830 million users to see).
- Recently I had a delivery for a 15-certificate Blu-ray box set (ordered from Amazon, naturally). DHL, one of the clumsiest and most lackadaisical organizations I've ever had the misfortune to deal with, was tasked with the seemingly insurmountable task of putting the parcel in my hand. The charming DHL courier insisted on seeing identification to prove my age, despite me being an obviously middle-aged man with total male pattern baldness (and, incidentally, old enough to have watched the contents of the box set when it first aired 35 years ago). When he saw my non-German passport, he stormed off in a rage, refusing me my parcel. I can only assume DHL's policy is that only German citizens should be allowed to receive (mildly) age-restricted products they have ordered in Germany (and paid VAT on).
When an antiquated, absurd German law (checking the age of someone who is visibly over the age of 50 when they order a mildly perilous movie or game online) gets poorly enforced by a one-size-fits-all company (Amazon) and then executed by a courier with zero training or knowledge, it is the end customer who suffers (if suffer is the right word for being denied the entire series run of Quantum Leap in high definition. Oh boy, how I wish Sam Beckett could fix this conundrum).
Note: you CANNOT complain to DHL Germany as a non-business recipient, their website is a shining example of an endless, engineered, torturous feedback loop. Whether email, telephone, form, bot chat, letter, it CANNOT be done. Try it for a laugh! You could argue that as a private recipient, technically you are not DHL's customer. But where would DHL be without those millions of "non-customers" (who are customers of their customers)? - I set up a virtual number for a client using a company called WorldNumbers a few years ago. Despite a somewhat clunky interface, the service basically worked well enough. That was until about a year ago when I started receiving emails via Zendesk from strange people claiming to be from WorldNumbers, asking me to send them scanned copies of photographic ID, business licenses, etc. The requests, or rather demands, did not come from the worldnumbers.com domain, which was suspicious as hell. I received numerous phone calls with strong Indian accents, which did nothing to alleviate my concerns, but never an email from the worldnumbers.com domain.
I did what any sensible person would do and refused to comply. The result? The virtual number was cut off. Now that is one way to destroy one's business with rude, irrational and nonsensical customer service. I'll give WorldNumbers a year if they continue to treat their customers in such an appalling way.
There are many more but for the sake of brevity, and to protect the guilty - who really don't deserve such loyalty - I will leave it there.
The point to this protracted, self-indulgent diatribe is: as long as we small businesses and service providers do not allow this entropy in corporate, globalized customer service to influence us, and we retain that personal one-to-one touch, then there will always be space for us in any market sector.
There will always be clients that want to deal with a human, not a script. Customer service should not operate around a "fire and forget" principle - it should be a two-way process that is capable of continuous improvement.
It is never enough to send a badly worded email from Thailand, Mexico, India or wherever that says "we are very sorry, it won't happen again, have a pleasant day." Because it DOES happen again, time and time again. Such responses are therefore a banal and wholly dishonest sentiment.
Update: a quick shout out to Cyberport who provided an excellent service shortly after I posted this article, thereby proving that the reports of the demise of great customer service have been greatly exaggerated. Cyberport deserve the highest praise for delivering me a new iMac, excellently packaged with full VAT receipt, less than two days after I ordered it. I even got a phone call to inform me it had been packed and was awaiting pickup. Just amazing!