Customer Service Is Dead. Long Live Customer Service!

Lots of marketing execs like to pretend that customer loyalty is dead. It’s a convenient copout because it allows the execs to continue providing minimal service, crappy products, and to pretend that nobody notices how badly they are running the company. People notice, though. Not only do they notice, they resent lousy service and do anything practical to avoid spending a single unnecessary penny with the crap service provider. Insider Monkey regularly asks who the “ten “most hated companies” in the country are. Nobody should be surprised at most of that list:

1. The Weinstein Company
2. Wells Fargo
3. Fox Corp
4. The University of Phoenix
5. Vice Media
6. The Trump Organization
7. Uber
8. Monsanto
9. Facebook
10. United Airlines

Another list with some repeat offenders is the 2017 Worst Customer Service list:

1. Comcast
2. Bank of America
3. Wells Fargo
4. Sprint
5. AT&T
6. DirectTV
7. Dish Network
8. Cox Communications
9. Spirit Airlines
10. United Airlines

A couple of TBTF banks, five well-known telecom offenders, and three airlines top the list of awful businesses to do business with. The kinds of complaints customers had about these shit-hole companies are:

1. Can’t get a real person on the phone.
2. Customer service is rude or condescending.
3. Customer gets disconnected.
4. …and then can’t reach the same representative again.
5. Gets transferred to a customer rep. who’s either in the wrong department or can’t help.
6. The company does not provide their customer service number, or “hides” it. (Talking about you, Amazon.)
7. Getting put on hold for long periods of time.
8. Too many steps through the phone menu required.
9. Getting asked the same question over and over.
10. The advice offered was entirely useless.

Sound familiar? There is a good business reason for all of this, believe it or not. Consumer Reports has found, over a fair number of years, that many the crappiest companies provide a pretty good investment return to their stockholders. That seems counterintuitive, but it is still true. Customers, maybe particularly US consumers (and voters), are insanely gullible and that is a “quality” that has been remarked upon for a couple of centuries. As a group, we appear to like abuse well enough to keep coming back for more of it. Companies like Apple have turned corporate abuse into a cult. So much so, that even the customers’ defense of their cult membership and behavior is as blatantly cultish as the Jonestown characters in the last minutes of that cult’s existence shouting down the few who tried to back out of guzzling Kool-Aid. Shitty customer service attracts a crowd who very well might be masochists.

I have had direct (employee) experience with companies that have successfully flaunted what seems like common sense in their quality and customer service procedures and done quite well with the tactic. One, a well-known mid-level guitar and MI manufacturer based in Chicago, out-right flaunted its crappy product quality (50% defect rate) and customer-hostile “service policies.” Considering how many seriously defective products that company shipped, its warranty costs were a fraction of what you might have expected. Their corporate, unwritten “limited lifetime non-transferable warranty” policy was “Ignore the first complaint, ignore the second complaint, if the customer keeps asking send a replace (which was also likely to be defective), and if the customer complains about the replacement start the whole process again.” Believe it or not, that worked more than 99.995% of the time.

My two medical devices employers weren’t much better, but their customers—patients, hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and Medicare/Medicaid—were no more critical in their acceptance of abuse.”Warranty coverage” for a failed implanted device was the replacement of the device, without any consideration for the fact that the replacement surgery was often a $50,000-or-more procedure. The device, either a pacemaker or an ICD, cost the manufacturer less than $300, including parts and assembly, and sold to the clinic for somewhere between $6,000 and $60,000, depending on the device. Only rarely could the manufacturers be talked into providing any financial assistance for replacement surgeries that would often bankrupt the patient and the patients’ families. Not only did the clinics and doctors continue using these products, but they happily accepted “educational” vacation trips to assorted luxury sites around the world and all the free donuts they could eat when the sales reps showed up to make their kickback rounds. US patients still don’t have or ask for any say in what kinds of life-threatening products doctors experiment with and the few hospital and physician quality measurement systems are constantly under attack by physicians, clinics and hospitals, and even the public (spurred by propaganda campaigns to uneducate the already dimwitted public).

So, if you’re upset now about lousy customer service, don’t blame the companies. Blame yourself and your neighbors for their cult-like docility and gullibility and their foolish spending habits. This is another example of “you get the [fill in the blank] you deserve.”

The Rat’s Rules: #4 Friend or Not-Friend

The Rat's Eye Business Rule #4: Friends can call you on your “bullshit” because they know something useful and they care about you. Everyone else is an acquaintance or just a face in the crowd.

These days, it feels like we’re all being pushed into polar positions. One of those poles is “friend or not-friend(ly)” and that, I guess, is nothing new. In my memory, I think I remember people with different views and politics remaining friendly, if not friends. Today, that seems so long ago and so impossible that it’s entirely possible I’m deluding myself. I have certainly had many Republican friends over the years, but now that being Republican means being a member of the Trump Cult, not so much. My tolerance for that kind of gullibility, racism, sexism, corruption, and treason is near-zero. As someone much wiser than me explained recently, my “bandwidth” for a lot of things has been reduced dramatically by both Trump and his Republican enablers and the cult drones.

One of the qualities I’ve always valued in my friends (of which I only have, and want, a very few) is the ability and willingness to call “bullshit” in both directions. We all get off-track multiple times in our lives and run the risk of crashing and burning or heading down a trail that we’ll either have to backtrack out of or we’ll dead-end into and be stuck. If you get more than a couple of chapters into You Are Not So Smart, you’ll have to face the ugly truth about yourself and, if you are even a little bit introspective, you should hope for a few friends in your life who will gently help you recalibrate. Or, sometimes, not so gently if what you really need is a kick in the ass.

Probably a qualifier for friendship must be a decent match in corrective styles and reasonable expectations. You can’t hear “you’re full of shit” from just anyone. That takes a background of credibility, honesty, competence, and at least a little affection before criticism amounts to anything more than mindless contradiction. If you can’t take hearing criticism from an acquaintance or you don’t feel comfortable giving it back to them, it could be that your styles are so different that you can’t get that close; and you may not ever. So, it’s very likely that, if you use this requirement for a “friend” you might discover you don’t have many friends. Maybe lots of acquaintances, but damned few friends. Don’t be discouraged, most people don’t have any actual friends.

Another important quality a friend should have is “usefulness.” Useful people are the only rational candidates for a practical friendship. My wife has a long history of acquiring housewives for “friends” and discovering how perfectly useless they are when she actually needs a friend for practically anything more complicated than a borrowed cup of sugar. There is no performance measure for either a housewife or a househusband. The only requirement for that job is finding someone dumb enough to carry your lazy ass while you do all of the family adult tasks. Housewife and househusband are just a couple of politically-correct words for “unskilled and unemployable.” My wife found this out the hard way several times, but like the majority of women she is intimidate by women with marketable skills. So, her friendships are lightweight and too often based on being the wives of my friends.

I don’t have a single friend who isn’t smarter than me, more skilled than me, more interesting and well-spoken than me, and who doesn’t have an assortment of skills I will never master or even comprehend. Why would I be otherwise? What would be the point in putting any effort into the relationship with a dumb, untalented, foolish person? What would anyone get from that, other than a misplaced sense of superiority? The world is full of stupid and ignorant people and if that is not a disqualifier for you, you have 99.999…% of the planet to befriend. Of course, if you actually ever need something useful from those relationships good luck with that.

Crime and Punishment–Sometimes

When I was a kid, my father and step-mother had one speed for their response to anything I did “wrong.” I could leave a sock on the bathroom floor, instead of putting it the often overflowing hamper, and get clobbered. I could steal and spend $50 of the money I collected on my paper route (of which no more than $2 would be my earnings) and I’d get clobbered. A little before I turned 14, I ran away to watch and hang out with jazz groups on 13th in Kansas City. My plan was to find work and get “the hell out of Dodge,” but I got picked up and put on the train back to Dodge by the Kansas City police, after they’d phoned my father to tell him where I’d been. And I got clobbered, but no worse than when I skipped out on church, on Saturday night, by sneaking out of the house and hiding in the old St. Mary’s college ruins basements until Sunday afternoon. Hell, I could use too much Crisco while deep frying chicken for the Sunday family lunch and I’d get clobbered.

There are a couple of ways to take that kind of feedback. One is “learned helplessness syndrome,” where the response would be to give up, assuming nothing I can do will change my environment. The other is to assume that there is no dynamic range to the punishment I’ll received, so I might as well try to get away with a lot rather than screw up a little. Since the variation in punishment is negligible, why not burn down the house instead of just overcooking lunch? .

Likewise, the situation with the Loud Boy invasion of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. this week and Trump’s lifetime behavior. Obviously, since the cops and military are going to meet extreme violence, a breech of national security, and destruction of public property with considerably less force and repercussions than waving signs and singing in a BLM protest received, why not try to bomb a few federal buildings, kill some cops, or kidnap a state governor or two and see if there is a noticeable reaction to that? Trump learned that betraying his friends and family was rewarded by his father’s favor and, later, with little-to-no negative reaction from government and business when he cheated on taxes, didn’t pay vendors, screwed over customers, and lied so constantly that a sane person would assume every word out of his mouth was a lie.

Likewise, if the Loud Boys and the white supremist and the renegade cops and other government employees (include Cruz and Hawley) who participated in and encouraged the domestic terrorism we all witnessed on January 6 are allowed to carry on as if they did not commit punishable crimes and sedition, you can be sure they will be back again and bigger.

The "J" Stands for "Genius"

From the mouths of morons comes the confirmation they were hoping to avoid. "The 'J' stands for 'genius.'" I admit that I do love this on multiple levels. The Trump rioters are throwbacks to the days when the majority of men were cannon fodder to be tossed into the front lines of every battle to die in numbers as large as possible to maintain population control, to efficiently burn off the excess male population, and to toss mostly-useless bodies between opponents and the royals and officers at the back of the battle lines.

Contrary to their desperate self-delusions, they are "stupid" and they have almost no place in a functioning 21st Century society. At an exponentially diminishing rate, society no longer needs ditch diggers, manual labor to lug bags of cement to the tops of buildings, or even slaves to sacrifice building pyramids and shrines to the rich-and-powerful who these goobers live to serve. At some point, useless and excess humans will have to either find a purpose or filter themselves out of the gene pool. Not only does industry no longer need unskilled and uneducated bodies for assembly line work or minimally skilled labor for construction, or farm labor that pays a living wage, but the planet needs to be rid of as many of this dead weight as possible to minimize the destruction of a human-supporting environment. (I'm not talking about "saving the planet." The planet will be fine without us, in as little as a few 100,000 years, but humans will not be on it then. Neither will most of the animal life we currently cohabitate with.)

The January 6, 2021 Trump rioters were a pack of mommas' boys, unemployed derelicts,  Trump's beloved "uneducated," a few trustfund brats and government employees, and, worst of all, off-duty cops demonstrating the kind of "law" they've been administering against citizens, but this time against other police officers.

Regardless of their education, employment, economic or social class, the one thing we can say about all of them is that they are stupid. They are also seditious criminals who deserve the most severe punishment possible for their crimes.