Customer First? Less and Less: The Downward Spiral of Customer Service
By Jamie Papp
’Tis the Season of Gift Purchasing, and our collective belief that customer service continues on a downward spiral to oblivion will again be confirmed. While we at U.S. HealthTek place a priority on and take pride in the attention our clients receive, last week we were sharing general terrible experiences. We acknowledge that the pandemic had an effect on customer service since person-to-person interaction was discouraged for safety reasons. But it turns out that for a variety of reasons, we never bounced back from those now seemingly glorious “before” days.
Customer Service Fails
Like you, I have plenty of customer service fail stories. And you no doubt know some of the epic ones – Verizon continuing to bill woman for dead father’s account, Charter Communications threatening to fine tornado victims for “losing” their cable boxes, and as I’m a player, my favorite: United Airlines not taking responsibility for destroying a $3,500 custom guitar (here’s the song about it). Of course, the day-to-day fails we experience – trying to get Amazon on the phone, getting an email returned, finding a clerk available to return a disobedient toaster oven – are all as frustrating as they are ubiquitous.
I did a little digging around and this is what I learned:
A Brief History of Customer Service
When the ancient Romans and Greeks were developing commerce, the merchants quickly figured out that the better relations were with their customers, the more “drachmas” they would have in their pocket at the end of the day. Repeat business was and is critical to surviving (besides just making working more pleasant), so that personal connection is an idea that is older than the Colosseum. So can we chart the demise of this idea to July 5, 1994, when Amazon was founded? Hmmm ….
All the Rage
My journey on this has allowed me to make some fun discoveries – did you know there’s something called the National Customer Rage Survey? Here are two interesting stats from that article:
- 74% of Americans say they’ve had a product or service problem in the past year, according to the 10th edition of the National Customer Rage Survey, which tracks satisfaction and incivility. The incidence of problems has more than doubled since 1976.
- And on the other side, consumers are described as increasingly vocal about it — literally. The survey found 43% of customers yelled or raised their voice to express displeasure about their most serious problem, up from 35% in 2015.
88% of us think customer service is more important than ever. What a disconnect.
“I’d Like to Speak to a Real Person Please”
A Harvard Business Review article from 2019 stated that we Americans spend on average 13 hours per year on the phone trying to get a customer service issue resolved, and a third of us make must make at least two calls to get any kind of resolution. Harvard figured this is costing our economy an estimated $38 billion. Now this was before the pandemic and AI bots, so trust these numbers have gotten even bigger.
Here’s the most discouraging point as to why customer service is bad and getting worse: It’s more profitable that way. Harvard: “Part of the answer is that a subset of companies purposely make callers jump through hoops with the hope that they’ll simply give up. When this happens, the company saves money on redress costs.… This may help us understand why some of the most hated companies in America are so profitable.”
Yet a Forbes article from March of this year cited a survey that said that 88% of customers think customer service is more important than ever. What a disconnect.
Redoubling Our Efforts
It’s one thing to talk about the problem of a new toaster oven breaking down after just a week of use – but in an industry like ours, the medical and healthcare field, surely it doesn’t compare, right? I was recently lamenting with colleagues how U.S. HealthTek founder Bryan Firestone and I were with a high-level member of our industry and hearing them say that they had trouble getting a vendor to return phone calls. Considering the high stakes of what we do, and how at the end of the day it’s all in the service of patients, it was stunning to hear.
One of the reasons I joined U.S. HealthTek after leaving a competitor was that their commitment to customer service was inspiring. It helps that the company is just the right size: big enough to handle any project, but nimble enough that everyone on board sincerely wants to see any organization we partner with succeed. The buck stops with each and every one of us. And it’s just a more enjoyable way to work, frankly. Yet despite (or because of) our high success rate with customer satisfaction, we are redoubling our efforts in ways that we will reveal next year. We have plans in place that will exceed expectations even more than we have in the past.
There is too often not much we can do with the determination of customer service in the general consumer world, but we can and do make it better in our industry. When you need an IT service or product to make your healthcare organization more efficient and profitable, give us a call and let us show you what “beyond expectation” customer service looks like.