Your customers don’t want to talk to you:
Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you ever waited in line for an ATM machine even though there is nobody in line for the teller inside the bank?
If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you’re not alone. Most customers these days demonstrate a huge — and increasing — appetite for self-service, yet most companies run their operations as if customers prefer to interact with them live.
In our research on this topic (which we discuss in our recent HBR article “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers“), we’ve found that corporate leaders dramatically overestimate the extent to which their customers actually want to talk to them. In fact, on average, companies tend to think their customers value live service more than twice as much as they value self service. But our data show that customers today are statistically indifferent about this — they value self-service just as much as using the phone. And guess what? By and large, this indifference holds regardless of their age, demographic, issue type, or urgency.
Part of this is due to the extremely scripted and rigid speech pattern that customer service agents are usually required to use. If you’re going to talk to a pseudo-robot anyway, why not go all the way and talk to a real robot?
I’ve always thought the “delight your customers” phrase was rather silly, unless you’re running a circus.
Some time back, maybe a year or two, my Wells Fargo branch seems to have adopted a policy of aggressive friendliness. They have a greeter to annoy you when you walk in. The tellers insist on introducing themselves and asking too many inane chit-chat questions that sometimes become intrusive. All this is a prelude to some kind of suggestive sell during the transaction.
Why do I have to say “no” to some lame offer every time I go to the bank? Can’t they at least track my responses and know that I don’t want their latest Passbook 9000 savings account?
I like to have a familiarity with the tellers should I ever have a difficult transaction. A machine can’t solve an unexpected problem. But can’t we just be polite and focus on getting the business done as quickly as possible? My time is worth money.
My post, Mindless Verbal Taylorism, explores some of these points.
I suspect that mindless verbal Taylorism reduces the quality of service from good service reps and increases the quality from bad reps — and most firms would prefer to pay less for help and go with a script to reduce downside risk. Still, the overly lengthy and overly elaborate greetings strike me as bad Taylorism, and I know I can’t be the only customer who doesn’t want to feel pressured by a “helpful” sales rep making me all kinds of offers.
Then again, sometimes I decide that I do want fries with that.