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.”