The most reliable service any large corporation seems to provides these days is the customer satisfaction survey.

You can spend three days trying to solve a problem they created, be transferred between departments like an unwanted Christmas present, explain your life story to six different people and emerge only slightly older than when you began. Yet somehow, before you’ve even had time to recover, an email lands in your inbox.

“How did we do?”

That’s a fascinating question because, more often than not, it isn’t actually asking how they did. It’s asking how the poor soul on the other end of the phone coped while wrestling with the system their employer built.

They’re not measuring customer service. They’re measuring damage control.

Somewhere over the last twenty years we’ve confused efficiency with service. Every company wants to be digital-first, streamlined, automated and frictionless. Unfortunately, the friction hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply been outsourced to the customer.

Remember when shops used to keep one of those old credit card imprint machines under the counter? If the electronic payment system failed, they reached for the little metal gadget, made that satisfying chunk-chunk noise and life continued.

It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.  Now, if the internet goes down, a department store looks as though civilisation has collapsed. The lights are on. The staff are standing there. The shelves are full. But apparently selling product has become impossible because the Wi-Fi has developed feelings.

We’ve built magnificent systems with one tiny design flaw. They only work when they work. There is no Plan B.

This became abundantly clear when I recently committed the reckless act of asking my telecommunications provider to activate Caller ID.

Not fibre to the premises.

Not a satellite launch.

Caller ID.

A request that, in my innocence, I imagined would involve someone pressing a button. Instead, it evolved into a three-day expedition involving multiple departments, several hours on hold, contradictory advice and enough identity verification to convince me I was attempting to access nuclear launch codes rather than my own phone account.

The staff were terrific. Every single one. Patient. Friendly. Professional. Genuinely trying to help. Which made the survey that arrived afterwards all the more ridiculous.

“How did our consultant handle your enquiry?”

Wonderfully. The better question is why your consultant needed three days to accomplish something that should have taken three minutes. That’s rather like asking passengers whether the flight attendant smiled enough after the airline accidentally landed in Tasmania instead of Melbourne.

The flight attendant isn’t the problem. The airline might be.

Large organisations have become remarkably good at ensuring the only human you can actually speak to is the one person with absolutely no authority to fix the underlying problem.

The software engineers who designed the system? Invisible.

The executives who approved the process? Untouchable.

The consultants who billed millions to “reimagine the customer journey”? Presumably off reimagining someone else’s. Instead, there’s Janice in customer service apologising on behalf of an organisation that keeps giving her impossible jobs and then asking me to rate her performance.

It’s corporate cowardice disguised as quality assurance.

Then there’s the recorded message before every call.

“Please remember to treat our customer service representatives with respect.”

Of course we should. Nobody deserves abuse for turning up to work. But perhaps companies should listen to their own recording. If every phone call now has to begin by reminding customers not to lose their temper, that isn’t evidence we’ve all become unreasonable. It’s evidence that your systems are making perfectly ordinary people contemplate screaming into a headset before they’ve even spoken to another human being.

Customer service staff have become emotional shock absorbers.

They’re expected to cushion every impact generated by software, policies and processes they neither designed nor control. Then management congratulates itself because ninety-two per cent of respondents said the representative was polite.

Splendid. Now fix the system.

Artificial intelligence promises to make all of this even better—or worse, depending on whether you’re the customer or the shareholder.

We’ll soon have chatbots assuring us they completely understand our frustration while simultaneously misunderstanding every word we’ve written.

The old Little Britain sketch where the bank employee simply says, “Computer says no,” used to be satire.  Increasingly, it feels like staff training.

Government websites have joined the party too. Finding a simple answer now involves navigating a digital hedge maze of glossy announcements, inspirational mission statements and photographs of people in high-vis vests pointing enthusiastically at infrastructure before eventually discovering that the information you actually wanted has been moved, renamed or quietly retired.

Everything has become an “experience.” Nothing has become easier.

 

So what is customer service?

Surely it isn’t the quality of the apology after the system has failed. Customer service is the system.

It’s whether I can accomplish a simple task without needing a spare afternoon, a fully charged phone and the emotional resilience of a hostage negotiator. Until companies start measuring that, they can keep their surveys. I already know how the customer service representative performed. The question I’m still waiting for someone to ask is:

“How well did the company serve the customer?”

Strangely enough, that survey never seems to arrive.