Customers from Hell

CUSTOMERS FROM HELL

It's 1990 and the final tally is official. During the 1980s - the decade of the Grand Rediscovery of the Customer - exactly 11 trillion corporate platitudes were uttered regarding a passionate dedication to customer service.

The fervor shows no signs of abating. Not only is the service economy upon us, but telling people how to thrive in the service economy has become its own industry. In our modest office library alone, the shelves groan with the weight of 23 books with "service" in their titles and 10 more that use the word "customers." Each week brings news that yet another "ultimate guide to winning through customer care" has found a publisher. A check through a half-dozen training-film catalogs turns up 65 entries under the heading "customer service." Under the same heading in TRAINING's 1989-90 Marketplace Directory, we count 268 listings for consultants, programs, products and services. Our file cabinet contains brochures for 11 major national conferences devoted exclusively to customer service in 1989 alone.

Placing a delighted smile on the face of every customer in America has become a national obsession. And who would argue with it? Certainly not any chief executive, or marketing director, or market researcher, or advertising agency head, or management consultant, or consumer affairs reporter.

As a matter of fact, the only real grumbling you ever hear about the idea of meeting or exceeding the expectations of every customer comes from the people who actually are asked to do so: that is, the front-line service workers - the bank tellers, flight attendants, waiters, hotel desk clerks, salespeople, et al. - who are supposed to put the smiles on all those faces.

And maybe it's time to quit kidding ourselves about the reasons. The problem is not always that front-line people aren't "on board" with the latest thinking about the importance of quality customer care. When asked, many of them can recite politically correct service...