Customer Service: DIY SOS

Chapter 5 of The Intention Economy, Asymmetrical Relations discusses the impoverished nature of customer service provision to modern consumers. Searls observes that “CRM came into vogue as a label…after sales force automation met the internet”. Or, put another way – lacking a powerful set of tools to assert his needs and individuality – the modern customer is trapped in a labyrinth of dissatisfaction created, ironically, by the very technologies that make the initial purchase (of goods and services) so easy. Searls brief history of the emergence of CRM tools helps contextualise the problem, and he provides some toe-curling personal examples of customer (dis)service “provided” by phone and via internet chat sessions.

Searls remarks that his wife refers to a trend of “outsourcing customer service to the customer” citing ATMs (cash points), self-service gas stations and self-service checkouts as examples. It might seem nit-picky – but to me there’s an important distinction between outsourcing order entry and customer service. Part of the initial genius of Amazon’s online shop was the step that it made in making the “search, shopping cart, order placement” sequence seamless – and entirely in the hands of the customer. In one fell swoop Amazon eliminated two of the key causes of customer frustration with traditional offline distance retailers (catalogues, mail order, etc): (1) the time lag between orders being placed and being entered into the vendor’s systems (which creates a window of time in which orders are invisible to customer service staff and therefore impossible to provide informed support for) and (2) orders placed but which somehow never make it into “the system”.  In the offline world it is astonishing how often the “system tail wags the service dog”. For sophisticated online retailers like Amazon, the customer-as-order-entry-clerk delivers a key cost-saving, and, importantly, places the onus for accuracy squarely in the hands of the customer. Cutting out this element of cost and error (and therefore frustration) was a key early step up the ladder of dominance.

Which is all well and good when (a) the customer knows what he wants (b) has zero desire for any human or quasi-human interaction. Ever. (c) doesn’t change his mind before the order is dispatched and (d) nothing goes wrong.

And of course that’s not the world we live in. You only have to visit somewhere like Beamish Open Air Museum and its reconstruction of an Edwardian town – with its hardware shop’s counter stretching the length of the shop and plentifully staffed – the sweet shop where sweets are carefully weighed out in response to request (not to mention made on the premises), its park and its band stand – to remember that humans are profoundly social creatures. And modern humans are often (despite the proliferation of social media) profoundly emotionally isolated and stressed creatures. Which makes for a volatile brew when delivery of goods and services that have been bought and sold so effortlessly online fail to meet expectations – and there’s no-one to talk to and help put it right. Hype and image, meet disappointed and frustrated. The fundamental problem here is that we’ve got as far as designing systems that deal with norms – because norms provide economies of scale that enable great purchasing experiences to be provided online. Problems are often particular to the individual (if we need proof of this, just look to how frustrating self-service online tech support menus are), and can’t be solved efficiently (and I mean efficient for the customer, not the provider) without context. A few minutes searching for specific answers in a generic menu of Q&As is usually enough to raise my blood pressure, make me grind my teeth, send up distress flares, signal SOS as and cry “why can’t I just talk to someone (who can answer a question not ask me how I am)”?

The publishing industry has a particular problem with customer service, partly because it is so confused about who the customer is: is it (or rather s/he) a reseller – which currently forms the overwhelming portion of publishers’ revenues – or is s/he the end consumer (user) of the book (ebook, journal, app)? Again this is something I’ve written about before and won’t rehearse the script again. My point here is that if publishing is to rethink itself as a service provider and not just a rights business we need to take a crash course in what’s good and what’s bad in customer service, and take lessons from other industries that are making progress in squaring the circle of achieving economies of scale versus providing satisfying individual experiences. The references (hyperlinked to the original sources if you’re reading on Kindle for iPad) in this chapter of Searls book provide an excellent reading list for a rapid catch-up with the historical causes of, present state of and potential future approaches to this problem. I think the evidence is that it is smaller, niche publishers who will make the transition to the service economy much more easily than the larger corporate publishers, by virtue of the fact that they already know who their customer are (the more specialist you are the more likely you are to know your customers by name) if – as small businesses – they can be sufficiently capitalised to afford the technologies required to participate in the market place. Will Atkinson of Faber is right to observe that publishers are good at forging partnerships – and new partnerships will be the key to success (Will is quoted in my June 21 post on Publishers and Innovation). In my consultancy work an area of particular focus is such specialist publishers, because in my view that’s where the customer service action and the interest really is.

Searls provides another quote from Craig Burton (cf yesterday’s post Capturing the Castle) to summarise the challenge: The demand chain and the supply chain need to pull each other, side by side. There need to be dialogs of process up, and down the whole system: seller to buyer, buyer to seller – and even buyer to buyer, and seller to seller. As someone who has worked in the supply chain, I entirely agree with this, although eventually I think we may want to dispense with notions of “up” and “down” the supply chain. As Robert B Cohen in his Book Changing the Face of the Internet. Virtual Worlds and the Information Economy: Impacts on European Policy, Jobs and Industrial Competitiveness suggests, the internet is giving rise to less hierarchical business structures and self-concepts and I hope that extends to the supply chain as well as just internal business hierarchies.

The Intention Economy proposes that a key step forward in solving the prevailing asymmetry between selling efficiency and individual service needs is the development of #VRM systems that place much more power into the hands of the customer (or as he suggested in his post at the project VRM site at the Berkman Centre at Harvard in reply to my VRM: The Amazon Example – systems that would enable each of us to be our own Amazon).

It’s time to ‘fess up. When first loaded The Intention Economy onto my iPad and opened it up in eager anticipation (to my shame I can’t even remember who pointed me to the book – but it’s a racing certainty Twitter was involved somewhere in the equation), I read the prologue and my heart hit my boots. When I read that the book is closely related to a development project at Harvard something in me prickled at the thought of an academic organisation undertaking a development project that could affect the entire commercial ecosystem of the Internet. Searls talked about the full value of free customers, and yet I feared that somehow they would be manipulated customers – using tools created out of an idealogical agenda and not a commercial one. I’m a big believer in gut instincts, but I’ve also learned to test my gut – because in the rare cases its wrong, its spectacularly wrong.  And in this case, testing my gut involved reading the book and thinking about its ideas. And the more I do, the more I know my initial reaction was wrong. To realise the full commercial and communicative potential of the Web we have to correct the asymmetry between vendor and customer. Publishers producing rich added-value content and content-interactions that customers seek to engage with, are uniquely positioned to be part of the process. How exciting is that?