Adobe, Customer Support, and Malarkey
July 1, 2011
Malarkey is, according to the Free Dictionary, “empty rhetoric or insincere or exaggerated talk; “that’s a lot of wind”; “don’t give me any of that jazz”. I learned the word from one of my grandparents who squeezed pennies until they screamed. Close watchers were they. Those folks knew rubbish. So do I.
I read an absolutely amazing write up “The New Art and Science of Great Customer Experience.” I am breathless. No, I am stunned. The author is, according to the post by Eric Savitz (not the author) is written by Rob Tarkoff, a senior manager at Adobe. Now, when I hear Adobe, I don’t think, “customer service.” I think about a Web site that is tough to navigate, my numerous official Adobe user names, and the incredibly awful support for the product I use to write my mindless, vapid monographs—Framemaker.
Come on, Adobe. Tell me how to set a custom color in Framemaker 9 and avoid generating every possible RGB value when I place a JPEG. Please, please, oh, Athena, please. Image source: Morguefile.
I do not think of Adobe and customer service, customer support, or customer anything. I think of annoying updates, ponderous PDF code, and an interface to Framemaker’s custom color controls that make me and my programmers weep in frustration.
Here’s the passage that got me thinking about customer support and search:
Some companies are taking the lead to provide true customer experience innovation. Smart brands are figuring out ways to extend the conversation beyond the purchase experience, creating new customer touch points by encouraging shoppers to share ideas and stories post sales on social sites such as My Starbucks Idea and Nike+. These brands are embracing new channels and new enterprise systems are being built to support them by discarding the constraints of past practices, architectures, and business models that inhibit true CEM.
Yikes, CEM or customer experience management. Wow. Oh, wow.
Today I think that word is just another bunch of baloney. Yep, ground mystery meat in a plastic tube is a good metaphor for “customer service” and its twin “customer experience”. I get the print version of Consumer Reports. One of the write ups in the July 2011 issue is “What’s Wrong with Customer Service?” I suppose this article is online, but for our purpose the article is a report based on what Consumer Reports’ readers perceived. The survey, like any whizzy 21st century mathercise can be distorted like a fun house mirror. Even though I am skeptical of surveys, the Consumer Reports’ data struck me as interesting for three reasons:
First, the lingo used by Consumer Reports is not the marketing baloney generated by search and content processing vendors trying to sell key word and next generation smart search. A good example is this statement:
Abominable is how retail industry consultant Jack Abelson describes the state of customer service in the US today.
Second, do humans want machines?
Callers want to reach a person. Seventy-one percent of survey respondents were “tremendously annoyed” when they couldn’t reach a human on the phone; 65 percent felt that way about rude sales people. And 56 percent felt that way about having to take multiple phone steps to reach the right place.
Third, what about Webby wizardry?
Face to face is out of favor. Only 16 percent of Americans prefer to deal with a customer service problem in person. Twenty percent favor the phone; 2 percent, live chat. Fewer still prefer email. Sixty percent of respondents said that their preferred method of contact depends on the nature of the problem.
These quotes come from page 16 of the write up in the July 2011 Consumer Reports.
The fascinating part of the four page write up is the chart on page 19 of the article. Among the outfits with the worst ratings are Bank of America, Wal-Mart, Dell, US Airways, and lots of others.
I don’t want to single out a particular search vendor as a newly minted expert in customer support. What’s clear to me is that customers see support as generally lousy. The top rated sector for customer support was financial services which makes sense. A call means churn or maybe something even more enticing to the Bernie Madoff-like professionals. The grade, according to consumer Reports, was 88. A solid B in Mrs. Mack 8th grade class in the middle of nowhere Illinois.
The lower quartile contained industries that put my teeth on edge; for example, phone providers, Internet providers, and computer technical support. Airlines? Slightly above the reviled cell phone sector. No big surprise to me.
Let’s take a step back. Assume the Consumer Report data are close enough for horse shoes. The reason customer support is lousy is related to cost pressure. Therefore, any product or service that allows an organization offering customer support to its customers is going to perk up the ears of the chief financial officer. Does quality control care about customer service? Nah. Does the president care about customer service? Nah. Does the business development guy care about customer service? Nah.
What’s going on is that search vendors are selling cost reduction in the manner of a health club selling fitness memberships. The person buys the dream of cost reduction, improved customer support, and whatever other malarkey—yep, that’s the right word—necessary to close the deal.
Do search and content processing systems improve customer service. For the CFO the only thing that matters is reducing costs. For the search vendor the only thing that matters is making a sale. For the president the only thing that matters is revenue. For the quality control professional, the only thing that matters is whether the supplier meets the spec or the salesman can sell a service that avoids costly litigation. For the business development unit, the only thing that matters is the next big deal. As long as customers are relatively quiet, good enough.
So search and content processing are positioned to reduce costs. Will the Consumer Reports’ data change dramatically next year? Probably not too much. Customers will just remain frustrated. Consumer Reports asserted that “67 percent [in the sample] had hung up on customer service without having had their problem addressed.” Maybe going lower is likely. Going up in satisfaction? Not likely.
Can search and content processing remediate customer support. No, systems make it possible to trim staff and force customers to unpopular email systems. Search for customer support means cost reduction, not an improvement in customer service.
Little wonder I ignore news releases about a search vendor with ageing technology winning a prize for the best whatzit for customer support. No surprise when I ignore calls from PR firms representing “voice of the customer” software.
Just my opinion. If you want to complain to ArnoldIT, use the comments section of this blog. A human will look at the comment and probably misunderstand it, misread it, or overlook it. If you call the goose, you will go to voice mail. If you search the blog, you won’t find your answer.
See how search expertise reduces costs and improves customer service. I should become a customer care consultant. I have the right angle of attack.
Stephen E Arnold, July 1, 2011
A fire cracker of a post from the author of The New Landscape of Search.
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