by Donna Pampalone

Created on: February 12, 2009

Good customer service as we once knew it has quickly become a thing of the past. Gone with it are all the things that made it good. Things like kindness, good manners, and a pleasant voice. There was a time when the customer was always right, and people went out of their way with kindness to help out with whatever they could. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case it has become quite the opposite as a matter of fact. No longer is the customer always right, and now days the customer often isn't even acknowledged by a human being.

In most cases we are no longer greeted by another person threw telephone communications. Instead, we are greeted by, electronically recorded messages that instruct us to press prompts to help solve whatever our problem may be. If pressing the prompts does not meet our needs, the automated system will tell us that we will be connected to the next available representative. If we do not get cut off while waiting to be connected to the next available representative, the next thing we hear is that there will be a wait time of anywhere from 2 to 10 minutes. After waiting, we may finally make contact with a representative. At this point, there is often poor telephone reception, and the representative's we reach are often not completely fluid in English. They speak broken English, and are often receiving your call from anywhere in the world, other than the good old USA. This makes explaining your situation very difficult to communicate.

When dealing with customer service we are in need of help to solve a problem or situation. By the time we do get to speak with a live customer service representative, we are surely quite frustrated with the whole ordeal. When we finally do reach them, they are not aware of the major effort that it has been to make contact with them. After explaining your situation in depth, we are often told that they cannot help our situation, but they will transfer you to a different department to a representative that can handle the situation. When the call is transferred, once again you must be patient while they put you on hold to wait for the next representative. Eventually your call will arrive at the right destination and that representative will hopefully, help solve your problem, if the problem can be solved. The whole process is time consuming and contains little human interaction for the amount of time that has been spent are on the phone.

In face-to-face customer service, it seems that long lost is the friendly cheerful smile that we were once greeted with. It appears that customer service today is really very different from how it once was. We don't see a lot of good manners, or much kindness anymore, and it seems that to some it is just a job for them to do, nothing more and thus, there is no extra effort or kindness is extended.

All this, makes me wonder just how much impact this technological age has had on not only the decline in customer service, but more so, how it has affected good old fashioned, human interaction and kindness which naturally brings good customer service.

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