findings , Dukes , who is now chair of the department , observed that “ going back to the White House survey in the late ’ 70s , can customer service actually be getting worse over half a century ? Or are customer expectations getting higher ? People are always looking for life to get more convenient .”
Noting the success of GE under Welch , Dukes said , “ You can ’ t just advertise your way to success . You have to try to get the customer to come back . At least the good customers . Some customers are not worth keeping . Marketing has come to recognize that not all customers are profitable . The strategic decision is to court the ones that bring the most business .”
Within that overall philosophy , Dukes noted that in some sectors “ companies have market power , which means they don ’ t have to compete as hard .” He cautioned that “ it is easy to pull examples of silly things that companies have done .” However , “ there is macro-economic research in anti-trust terms that leads some economists to argue that competition has declined .”
In an oligopoly , competition almost seems to work in reverse . For example , if there are only a few major companies in one segment , and one moves all its telephone customer service to chatbots to reduce labor costs , there is an incentive for the others to follow suit . “ That sort of tacit collusion is an example of a decline of customer service ,” said Dukes .
Another perspective on the perception of poor service comes from a man whose job it is to measure those perceptions for corporations : Scott M . Broetzmann , president and CEO of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting ( CCMC ). “ If you add up the number of transactions that people have today , as compared to 10 or 20 years ago , then there are going to be more complaints because there are more transactions ,” he said . “ Devices and services that did not even exist a generation ago would now be on Maslow ’ s Hierarchy of Needs .”
He also noted what he called the “ Amazon Effect ,” where some companies are big and rich enough that they can make problems go away . “ Only a few companies can do that , but it raises overall expectations on the part of the consumer ,” said
Source : Customer Care Measurement & Consulting , in collaboration with The Center for Services Leadership in the W . P . Carey School of Business at Arizona State University . January 2023 .
Broetzmann . “ That has a knock-on effect of disappointment in other companies .”
As production , order fulfillment and customer interactions have all become more automated , there has been a sharp bifurcation between complaint resolution that can also be automated and those that cannot ( see sidebar , page 31 ).
CCMC conducts surveys for both business-to-business and business-toconsumer companies , and it publishes the National Customer Rage Survey every two years to “ shine a light on the darker side of the customer experience . The study examines the emotions , motivations , intentions and behaviors associated with two distinct yet interconnected forms of marketplace conflict between companies / organizations and their customers [ including ] customer rage and customer uncivility .”
Even correcting for increased expectations , Broetzmann suggested that one key factor in the decline , or perceived decline , in customer service is “ the siloed nature of most C-suites . That gets in the way of ownership of fixing problems . The worst cultures are the companies where there is no single advocate for customers at the C-suite [ level ]. There is a movement within some companies to put one person
www . MoAF . org | Summer 2024 | FINANCIAL HISTORY 29