I have recently concluded that for at least the near future, we are going to continue to see a decline in good customer service and experience. While I don’t think all hope is lost, we are living in a new age of transactional based customer engagement. This means that an individual customer does not matter as much as a trend or some public visibility. The idea of lowering customer expectations isn’t new; we didn’t get here overnight. Before I get into what it means for us, I’ll share that you are already impacted, and you are already affected. While I won’t bore you with the gory details of how we got here, I’ll share some things to consider when you start to get frustrated as a customer.
Read the Fine print / There is no Fine print / There is a lot of Fine print / What the hell is going on with this Fine print?
Over the years some very smart lawyers decided to exploit the exact words of the law as opposed to honoring the spirit of the law. Who can blame them? They were doing exactly what they needed to do for their customers. What is the result? Well, let’s start with something very simple. When you install a piece of software or an application, you may click through a contract. You may check the box “I agree” and move on. You have no idea what you agreed to and generally speaking, you agreed to whatever that software company made sense for themselves and their benefit and their limited liability. You may have agreed to pay additional charges for services. You may have agreed to subscribe to something vs own it. Regardless, you’ve been overwhelmed with words, so you click through it. Same could be said, if you’ve ever gone for a mortgage, bought a car, or anything substantial today. The fine print is all there but it is so overwhelming that our puny human brains can’t process it all. Let’s say you get smart, and you copy and paste the agreement into AI, what action could you take to modify the contract or the agreement? You absolutely have a choice. The choice is don’t get the thing or get the thing. You don’t have easy options relative to your agreement about the thing.
This one sided contract bullshit is everywhere. You decide you want to go on a cruise with your family. If you don’t sign their contract, your husband or wife can sign it for you. If you don’t click “I agree” you have to call them. If you don’t click “I agree” you do not have options to modify the contract. A contract expressed or implied, is an agreement between two mutual parties. The person writing the contract does not need the person reading the contract or agreeing to participate in the creation of the contract. They only require acknowledgement and agreement of some form. If you literally click something electronically with one mouse click, you can agree to give your whole life away. How bout dat?
What about the power of the people?
One of the main issues that we face today is the corporate and political consumption, analysis and manipulation of large data sets. Data is used for trends and even consideration of hyper personalization. Hyper personalization is not what you may think it is. It is personalized for an individual relative to the individual as tied to the group. Meaning something specific in a common dynamic. There isn’t something specific and necessarily wholly unique. Now that is very different. These companies have information about you and me. They have a lot of data that informs them of what will make you buy more or tolerate pain. The scales used today when you take a survey are not for you, they aren’t to give you a better experience. They are to inform someone sitting in an airport drinking a cup of coffee on a Teams call of a trend to paste into a PowerPoint. That is the true reason for survey. Now, if the trend informs the company (not a person) of something important that will have a major financial impact, they may and I mean MAY do something to limit the impact. They also may not because they can see if doing nothing blows over or they may be able to tolerate the impact. Where do you see this? For one, you see this commonly in airlines. Over the years, flying has become a horrible experience. As a child, my father would take me to the airport just to see the planes take off and land. Today, I go to the airport for pain and misery. Let’s say that we don’t focus on the airport itself but only the flight. The prices go up, the experience on the lower tiered pricing for the common person goes down and the interest the airline has in your experience only informs them as to the likelihood of you trying to go somewhere else. Now, even if you decide that you’ve had it with the airline you flew on, go to another one and you get the same thing.
Loyalty programs suck today. They literally want you to pay for points. So, instead of earning points through natural interactions, you can pay for points to get better service, or you can buy a better service? Then you buy the points, you buy the service, and it sucks too. Is good service dead? Is good experience dead and gone? No, but chances are, you’ll have a shitty non remediated experience vs a good one. When you email customer service, you’ll get a response from a robot or a person that has a limited number of options between 0 and 1 of what they can or will do to help you.
Tell me something I don’t know
While this rule may not always hold true, the best thing you can do is buy local and from a small business. Now I know, I’ve been talking about airplanes, and we don’t have a local airplane person but if you’re following me here, I am talking about customer service and customer experience. For the record and clarity, I am NOT saying that you will have a good experience and good customer service if you buy local. I am saying it is likely that you will have a better experience if you buy local. Generally speaking, when it comes to service today, I can’t find one thing top of mind where I am saying “wow, this was great!” What we can see today more often than not is small business or what was small business bought out by large companies who bought the customer base and destroy the brand. Small business that did survive and thrive may struggle due to a number of reasons and this limits their ability to grow and to do the work.
The something that you don’t know is small business may actually be held by an equity firm or a company. The heating and refrigeration guy or local pest control, or whatever is more likely to be something big hidden behind the name of something small.
Enough Already – What do you want from me?
Our world is still full of beauty and surprises. There are good people out there that care and it ain’t all bad. However, when it comes to how we buy things and our experiences, we should really understand what we are dealing with and be prepared with realistic expectations. Recently, I had a problem with a truck I own. I bought it at the end of December and while I looked it over as best I could, I didn’t see the top of the truck. More recently, I needed to climb onto the back of the truck to load something on it. When I saw the top, the rubber gasket around the sunroof was shredded. I brought it to the dealer, and they said, since manufacturers decided to use soy in their products, rodents like to eat cars and trucks. The rubber needs to be replaced, and I didn’t know whether this happened before or after I bought the truck. I paid for the repair and I asked them since the truck was only in my hands for six months if they’d at least meet me part of the way. The part of the way they’d meet me is shaking my hand and holding the door for me as I walk out with a $500.00 cup of their best pod coffee. Aren’t they concerned that I had a good experience? Don’t they have a responsibility? Didn’t I have some warranty? Is it fair to assume that it happened after I bought the truck? Sure, all good questions but let me please remind you of what you may have skipped over at the top, READ THE FINE PRINT. When you walk out the door, your money hits our bank account, you lose it and the value you had from the prior purchase is now the value you have in potential for the next. If the next purchase is through a referral or down the line, we don’t care about that too much. One thing in the auto industry is, “Hey can you please give us a good review on google or our survey?” In the case of an auto dealer, they may call you but they’ll explain to you why you are stupid and don’t understand caveat emptor which means “learn Latin dumbass.”
Buy local where you can, you’ll pay a little more upfront but get better service. Buy from small business where you can even though they may not actually be a small business, you don’t need to do all the homework to figure it out. They could be a small business, maybe, hopefully, probably.
Don’t waste your time and energy on fighting with companies unless you want to do this for sport. The long email you sent to United Airlines gets sent to Hoomba Tumba on the small island of Bakka Booka somewhere between New Zealand and Antartica. The people there come from Elbonia and work for chicken heads. You can’t get chicken heads in Hoomba Tumba because they don’t have chickens. United found out about this and made a deal with Elon for Starlink, now the Hoomba’s are all linked up. For less than a dollar an hour, they’ll answer customer complaints with their autogenerated scripts that AI can’t reasonably personalize yet. United also does some low flyby’s every once in a while to drop off supplies. It’s in their contract. Also, it’s International Hoomba month and on behalf of their partnership with the people of Hoomba Tumba and the long history of the native Elbonian’s United has invested in placing a picture in the coveted spot of their inflight magazine right near the Vodka and chips. Everyone reading will be sure to celebrate.
While you may think this sounds ridiculous, this is the way it is. Years ago, Walmart had a policy of 100% customer satisfaction. Up into the 2010’s Walmart quietly removed signage and changed their campaigns around 100% satisfaction. They continued to talk about customer satisfaction but changed the meaning. Why? Because it was expensive and as with all other companies, they figured out they could afford to lose a few customers with no opportunity loss impact identified to their shareholders.
You should be aware that companies have lowered the bar on customer service. Customer service and customer experience create major gains for companies when they choose to make the investment but if a company has flat to down costs and relatively reasonable gains in the market as a year over year trends, they don’t need to do anything. If you have a bad experience and they lose you, they don’t care.
Here are a few ways that I have addressed this in my personal life that you may consider:
- Aim low – I no longer have an expectation of a good customer experience or good service. I expect that most things will be mostly garbage with a few surprises now and again that I can celebrate.
- I look at the cost of complaining vs the cost of acceptance. I bought the truck, I paid to fix it, they could have and should have done something about it, they didn’t, I moved on. I probably won’t go back for another truck there and I won’t recommend them. I won’t write a Google post but no one will know anyways.
- I evaluate the system and look to see what makes sense to address. Credit card companies used to protect you with purchases. Over the years, they stopped doing that even though they say they do. That said, if you are paying a premium like Amex, there is a chance they will help you. You are basically paying for some insurance and even with a lot of spend, you’ll come up financially flat with your card fee. It can be worth it, if Amex or your credit card company honors the promise. Citi Mastercard did NOT, so I left them but let us be honest, they don’t care.
- I am honest with myself. If it looks like it cost a dollar, it probably is about ten dollars. If I know this going in, I can’t be upset with what happens.
- Service oriented people have less ability than they used to. In the old days, people could do something without asking a manager and the manager could do something without asking the CEO. Those days are gone.
- AI doesn’t understand customer service. If you are interacting with a machine, it can only do what it is allowed to do. There is no “sorry that you are having a bad day and I know how this feels, and I will help you .. wink and smile.” If I am dealing with AI, I know it won’t give me anything it can’t.
- Buy local and small where I can. I have said this a few times but local and small business owners care about it because they need you back, they want you back.
- A motto used to be, “you get what you pay for.” Now, I believe “you pay for what you get” meaning, unless you really want or need something, think about what you are buying and who you are interacting with more carefully. You may find yourself in a contract that costs you more than the value of the product or service as advertised.
Take my perspective for what it’s worth. I am thinking these days that it is more important to be chill and happy vs fight with a company because they lied. If switching phone companies once a year is an activity that makes me feel good, then I’ll do it. The fact is and the truth is that you have to fend for yourself, and this means choose your battles wisely. If not, it would be a second and third job to hold everyone accountable to the promises that they barely made while sucking funds directly out of your bank account for services rendered as a third party to them that you pay for but didn’t know about.
On another note, you may find spelling or grammatical errors in my post these days. While they aren’t there on purpose, I am not using AI to alter the messaging or my writing in any way. These posts come from me directly, hands on keyboard with some research as needed but mostly care of the coffee machine and a good dose of intense emotion!
I hope you like them, please let me know!