Annoying services
Written by Simon Clatworthy
A recent article in the New York Times (link) highlights the frustrations we all have with services. They refer to a consumer reports survey (link) in which people were asked about everyday annoyances, with 10 being the most annoying, and 1 the least annoying. I guess it doesn’t take much to guess that high up on the list, and second only to hidden fees (a score of 8.9) comes, yes you guessed it, failure to get a human on a customer service line at (8.6). Even the annoyingly wrong weather man scored only 4.3.
Not only is this a shocking number, but more than this, its a strange comment on society that we accept this terrible service. If we translated this to the product world, to say, unreliable products, then there is no way that we would accept such poor results. We would move on to a competitor. Its strange, but we have an acceptance for poor services, in the same way that we had an acceptance of unreliable products twenty five years ago. Since then, thanks mostly to the Japanese quality circles, we just expect products to be reliable. It is no longer a problem for us, and we just expect products to work nowadays.
I strongly believe that in 25 years time, we will look back on things like this as being the period in which services came good. We are in a period now where customer focus and customer experience is coming to services, and in the same way that competition raised the bar in products, the same will happen in services. Service leaders will gradually lift the level of service, so that in the end, poor service will stand out as an outlier and not the norm. Lets hope the consumer reports study in 2030 reverses the numbers, and that the most annoying thing for consumers is the weather forecast.