Have it your way

And do it yourself...

Photo by Kate Townsend on Unsplash

When I was in high school, one of my best buddies refused to clean up after himself at McDonald’s, or any fast food restaurant. He was a bit of an iconoclast, and kind of a laid-back stoner fella, and we let him slide. Only after getting upbraided by a manager one day for failing to take his tray away, did we come to understand that his inaction was a form of protest. “Have your employees take it, they do in other restaurants,” he said. When the manager replied that he didn’t have staff for that, John replied: “hire more, and pay them better.” Irrespective of the fact that most fast food joints no longer offer the speed or cheap experience that efficiency was designed to enable, they have continued to shed staff. John had recognized something 40-odd years ago that has now becoming part of the public conciousness and dialogue: dissatisfaction with the do-it-yourself service economy.

While some studies show that consumers can be satisfied with self-service, this is so only when it’s done correctly, which, as we discussed last week, is not always the norm. The supermarket check-out is one example of self-service that breeds dissatisfaction. The technology is often cumbersome, bug-ridden, broken, and often necessitates human intervention by staff that is increasingly not to be found.

According to sociologist and author Christopher Andrews, self-check out “delivers nothing of what it promises.” His book, “The Overworked Consumer,” asks the question: Are big businesses simply being cheap and lazy, preferring to automate and outsource work to unpaid consumers instead of raising wages, or is self-service and its do-it-yourself ethos a response to consumers’ demands for faster, easier ways of buying goods and services? You’ll have to read the book to see what the author concludes, but it is telling that a number of retailers ditched the self-service checkout lanes when customer satisfaction plummeted. This includes regional grocer Big Y, which is family-owned and noted for its focus on customer and community service.

According to Zendesk, a customer service technology and consulting firm, 69 percent of consumers it surveyed want to resolve as many issues as possible using self-service options, but that technology needs to be supported by people. From both my professional and personal experiences, this is where most customer service fails, and it fails ar a greater rate the larger an organization gets and the more it relies on technology alone. Simply put, research shows that in most cases if you are installing technology to cut costs and don’t invest in more highly trained and empathetic people to support the customer experience, you will likely reap a whirlwind.

Whether it’s burgers, groceries or Lucy in the candy factory, improperly executed, technology can ruin a worker or customer experience and lose business. The key is to make it easy access a live, empowered and caring human, at any time and point in the process.

Sadly, It’s a lesson that’s not been well-heeded. But there’s hope: the trend towards consumers favoring smaller, local and sustainable organizations may finally be turning the tide on one of the great frustrations of modern times.