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Customer disservice
Many call, few are heard
By CAROLINE E. MAYER
Washington Post
Posted: April 4, 2004
When Mary Culnan's 3-year-old Kenmore washing machine broke in February, it took three appointments before a Sears repairman showed up.
Before he even examined the machine, he blamed the problem on Culnan, saying she had not only used the wrong detergent but also the wrong
cycle. The permanent press setting, he said, could have burned out the machine's contacts.
"I have no idea what that means," said Culnan, a Boston-area professor. The repairman finally traced the problem to a defective
circuit board, which fixed things - for a while.
When Scott Rozett bought a family cell phone plan last June, the salesman assured him he could make and receive calls in San Francisco at no
extra charge.
But in November, one month after the Idaho resident visited the Bay area, he received a $160 bill for roaming charges. When he called AT&T
Wireless, a customer service representative told him the company was not responsible for promises made by a salesman.
When an error in Manon Matchett's Sprint PCS bill caused her service to be disconnected in December, she spent three days trying to get it
restored. She called at least twice a day, she says, and each time was transferred from one department to another as she tried to get credit for payments that had never been posted to her account.
She talked to at least nine people, but "no one could make a definitive decision," said Matchett, an office manager in Washington,
D.C. Nor could she reach a manager, even in the middle of the day. "I was told no managers were available. It was pure hell," Matchett said.
As Culnan, Rozett and Matchett have discovered, customer service has deteriorated into a new kind of purgatory, one in which companies pass the
buck, frequently from one corporate division to another. Or customer service representatives blame other companies. Or, worse, they fault their customers.
"Customer service is getting worse; it's not getting better," said John Tschohl, a Minneapolis customer service consultant. Certain
industries are more unsatisfactory than others, he added, singling out cell phone companies as bottom-of-the-bar-rel bad. But, he added, customer service has gone south in all kinds of industries.
There is no historical measurement to show if and how customer service may have declined over the past few years, but consultants and academics
say there is abundant anecdotal evidence.
Driving customers away
A snapshot of consumer satisfaction by the University of Michigan Business School reveals a large group of unhappy campers. In its most recent
American Customer Satisfaction Index, the average score for complaint handling is 57 (out of 100) for the 40 industries tracked by the index.
"No one does a particularly good job in handling complaints," said David VanAmburg, managing director of the index, which measures
consumer satisfaction with goods and services.
There is one exception: supermarkets, which had a customer satisfaction score of 76 for how they take care of complaints. The lowest score was
recorded by local telephone firms (the index didn't measure wireless phone service).
Even more disturbing, VanAmburg said, is that a closer look at 17 industries with enough data to measure satisfaction in great detail showed 14
- or 82% - field complaints in such a way that they are driving customers away.
Why has customer service gone downhill?
Claes Fornell, director of the University of Michigan's National Quality Research Center, which computes the customer satisfaction index,
blames the "productivity trap."
With companies looking to do more with less labor, or lower labor costs, customer service is one area that suffers. Firms trim employees and/or
training. Or they hire outside firms, often with foreign call centers, to handle consumer complaints. "It may be cheaper, but (it's) not necessarily better," Fornell said.
Bad service the norm
Michael J. Budde, president of Advanced Data-Comm Inc., with six call centers, all in the United States, hears constantly about cost issues
from clients, particularly as they consider taking business offshore, wherecosts can be cut by 20% to 30%.
To meet the competition, Budde's firm often agrees to try to end a call as quickly as possible. "If the average call is three
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