In recent months, I have wasted countless hours engaged with customer service agents in what has more often than not felt like a contest of wills. Most of my time in these battles has been spent either on hold or having to re-explain an issue to the new customer service agent the last one transferred me to.
I know I’m not alone in this peculiar battle. According to a survey from TalkTo, a company that provides text messaging services for companies, Americans spend an average of 13 hours of the year on hold for service. Meanwhile, Customer Care Measurement & Consulting’s 2023 Customer Rage Survey, an annual survey of customer complaint satisfaction, reports that 61% of consumers were left unsatisfied by customer service last year.
From the perspective of trust, the endemic of bad customer service is counterintuitive. Consumers only contact customer care when a brand has already broken their trust in some way, often by delivering a product or service that isn’t up to scratch. Customer care should be an opportunity for the brand to rebuild that trust, yet in many cases it appears to only make things worse.
Amas Tenumah, a former customer care consultant at IBM and the author of Waiting for Service, says the apparent ineptitude in customer care is on purpose.
“Customer service is designed to inject friction,” Tenumah tells me. “Not for any nefarious reason, beyond a simple profit motive.”
Between staffing call centers and issuing refunds or exchanges, post-service customer care obviously comes at a cost to companies. And it’s a cost for which most companies, Tenumah says, don’t see an upside. Like many facets of trust, it’s hard to accurately measure the influence good customer care has on revenue. But companies are obligated to provide customer care anyway because if a company has zero customer care, that will have an impact.
“Think of it like a trash collection service,” Tenumah says, likening customer care to a service everyone wants but no one wants to think about. “No one is going to move to a neighborhood because of the quality of the trash collection. But if the collection stops and trash starts piling up, it might be the reason someone leaves.”
Even providing bad customer care is better for a company’s bottom line than providing none. Consider how often you hear a passenger complaining about an airline’s poor service while continuing to fly with that airline. That’s why companies design customer care to inject what Tenumah calls “friction,” separating customers from the more costly tiers of post-service care.
Rather than connect complaining customers directly with a human authorized to issue refunds, for example, it’s cheaper to provide an automated level of service first. If a customer persists past that point and connects to a human, it’s cheaper if that human isn’t authorized to issue refunds; customers have to connect to another tier of service to unlock that, and many will drop out before getting there.
For many companies, the goal isn’t to provide bad service per se, but to provide service cheaply. Bad service is often the consequence of cutting costs, but optimists are hopeful that advances in tech can check both boxes, providing good service on the cheap. (I’ll be speaking to some proponents of how generative AI can improve the customer service experience later this month.)
It’s worth noting that, in many cases, tech already has made things better. For the roughly one-third of customers who have complaints that can be resolved in a few button punches, automated helplines are a frictionless interaction. And Tenumah can name a few companies that are doing customer service well—such as Zappos, Discover Card, and Southwest Airlines—where the secret is that the CEO is all-in on making customer service the top priority.
But Tenumah thinks that, ultimately, the way to prevent customer care from being a drain on customer trust is to bring the department out of its silo of operation.
“It’s the marketing departments that make brand promises, and the service side that is responsible for keeping it,” Tenumah says. “But often those two departments don’t talk, so it seems services are constantly breaking our trust.”
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Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
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TRUST EXERCISE
“As the FAA digs in for protracted, intrusive oversight into Boeing’s internal process challenges in the months ahead, it will become progressively harder for Calhoun to control the narrative and continue fortifying public trust.”
That’s one takeaway of the ongoing Boeing fiasco offered by academics Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian in a Fortune op-ed. The duo have a three-point plan for Boeing CEO David Calhoun to follow in the wake of the airline's latest crisis. Number three on the list? “Fortify public trust instead of deferring to regulators in communicating with the public.”