Service Slide: Navigating the Declining Landscape of Customer Service in the Digital Era
Customer service, a term once synonymous with courtesy and attentive representatives, has evolved into a complex maze, quite distant from its genteel past. The era where a simple greeting or first-name basis was deemed too forward is long gone, giving way to a casualness that borders on overfamiliarity. What’s more, the shift towards digital solutions, while seemingly efficient, has led to a decline in effective resolutions and customer satisfaction. This reflects a broader transformation in societal interactions, a change that mirrors the technological advancements and evolving customer expectations of our times.
This transformation traces back to the 80s and 90s with the advent of CRM systems, facilitating better management of customer data and interactions. The internet brought e-commerce and online feedback, transforming customer engagement, while the early 21st century witnessed social media's impact, elevating the importance of online reputation and service.
Amidst this transformation, AI and automation began playing a pivotal role in customer service, offering round-the-clock support and handling routine queries efficiently, but sometimes falling short on the personal touch. Despite the significant advances in AI, human oversight remains crucial for complex issues. Nevertheless, many companies heavily lean on these technologies in their customer service strategies, a move driven more by cost-saving motives than enhancing customer satisfaction.
The pandemic often became a default excuse for subpar customer service. The sudden shift to digital and remote operations, while necessary, led to delays and a decline in service quality for many customers. A common feature of this period was the ubiquitous warning that COVID-19 was affecting call wait time and became a standard preamble to customer service calls, underscoring the challenges of digital transformation in customer service but also subtly masked a drop in productivity that the pandemic was often used to justify.
The UKCSI of July 2023 underscores this decline, plunging to its lowest in years. Every sector experienced a dip, with a noticeable 48% of customers reporting longer resolution times.
Adding to the complexities, rigid CRM systems and internal tools often hinder customer service representatives from providing flexible and effective solutions, leading to customer dissatisfaction. A common refrain, "While I understand your frustration, the system won't allow me to do that”, highlights a significant gap between customer needs and system capabilities. This not only leads to customer frustration but compels service agents to seek special intervention from supervisors, unnecessarily prolonging the resolution process. This limitation in customer service systems reveals a trust shift from service representatives to prescribed solutions. Agents, once empowered to tailor resolutions, now find themselves confined to predefined options, often ill-suited for unique customer situations requiring more personalised attention.
The rise of fraudulent reviews, particularly on platforms like Trustpilot, further complicates the customer service landscape. In 2021 alone, Trustpilot identified and removed approximately 2.7 million fake reviews, which accounted for a sizeable 5.8% of all reviews submitted that year. This significant occurrence of fake reviews has led to a growing skepticism about the reliability of online feedback. As a result, holding companies accountable for their customer service has become increasingly challenging. The ease of manipulating online ratings has cast a shadow over genuine customer grievances, making it difficult for consumers to navigate what's real and what's fabricated. Moreover, the internal complaints processes and external arbitration policies of many companies add to customer's woes. These often lengthy and convoluted procedures can make resolving issues a tiresome affair. In cases where satisfaction is not achieved, customers are left with no choice but to approach ombudsmen or regulators, a laborious process that the typical consumer would rather avoid.
The increasing preference for chatbots and FAQs over direct human interaction adds another layer of frustration for customers seeking personalised solutions. Using these as the primary mode of customer interaction has become a cost-saving norm for many companies, often relegating direct human contact to a last resort. This shift, while economical for businesses, frequently leaves customers in a bind. Responding to ironically personified bots—complete with names, friendly greetings, and avatars—using phrases like 'I need to speak to a human' is becoming increasingly ineffective. Companies are adapting their systems to circumvent such requests, further emphasising the irony of these seemingly humanised but essentially automated interactions. This reliance on automated responses not only fails to resolve more complex or unique queries but also adds to customer frustration, reflecting a disconnect between the promise of customer service and its increasingly impersonal delivery.
In addition, text expanders, or text replacement and shortcut apps, have become increasingly popular in customer service settings for their efficiency in streamlining communication but often lead to irrelevant responses in customer service. These preset shortcuts can deflect genuine queries, providing generic answers that don’t truly address specific customer issues. This not only frustrates customers seeking tailored assistance but can also be an easy way for representatives to prematurely close cases without proper resolution.
The rise of digital-only services, such as certain UK car insurers and energy providers, further complicates the landscape. These services, often subsidiaries of established companies operating in the same sector, are geared towards a digital-first audience, offering reduced costs as their primary appeal. These services opt for digitised customer service methods, like email and live chat, leading to longer resolution times and reduced personal interaction. For services that are not frequently contacted, like insurers, this might seem a reasonable compromise. However, when issues do arise, customers often find themselves contending with a service landscape that is both less responsive and more impersonal, a stark contrast especially in sectors where tailored, attentive customer service is not just preferred, but often essential.
Overall, to counter these trends, finding a balance between technological efficiency and human empathy has become essential. Prioritising personalised customer interactions and ensuring easy access to human support could be key in enhancing the overall customer experience, blending the best of both worlds.