Raise your hand if you haven’t had at least one bad customer service interaction within the past year. Exactly.
By: Eamon Barrett – Fortune
In recent months, I have wasted countless hours engaged with customer service agents in what has more often than not felt like a contest of wills. Most of my time in these battles has been spent either on hold or having to re-explain an issue to the new customer service agent the last one transferred me to.
I know I’m not alone in this peculiar battle. According to a survey from TalkTo, a company that provides text messaging services for companies, Americans spend an average of 13 hours of the year on hold for service. Meanwhile, Customer Care Measurement & Consulting’s 2023 Customer Rage Survey, an annual survey of customer complaint satisfaction, reports that 61% of consumers were left unsatisfied by customer service last year.
From the perspective of trust, the endemic of bad customer service is counterintuitive. Consumers only contact customer care when a brand has already broken their trust in some way, often by delivering a product or service that isn’t up to scratch. Customer care should be an opportunity for the brand to rebuild that trust, yet in many cases it appears to only make things worse.
Amas Tenumah, a former customer care consultant at IBM and the author of Waiting for Service, says the apparent ineptitude in customer care is on purpose.
“Customer service is designed to inject friction,” Tenumah tells me. “Not for any nefarious reason, beyond a simple profit motive.”
