When Did Customer Service Become Optional?

Shame on you, retailers!

As a customer, I fully recognize that some brands are going to deliver better customer service than others. Some are going to be quicker and more complete in their resolution attempts. Some are going to demonstrate that they value my business more than others.

But in that binary breakdown, I am envisioning customer service either being good or bad. At no point did I realize I need to account for a third grade: non-existent.

A recent evaluation of the support major retailers deliver via e-mail sheds light on the same shocking reality perpetually uncovered by social customer care analyses: many businesses view customer service as an optional exercise.

Stella Service, which found similarly troubling results during a spring inquiry into social customer support, revealed recently that only 54% of the top retailers responded completely to customers’ email inquiries.

Yes, that means in 46% of cases, retailers evidently felt no compulsion to support the entity that is supposedly the driving force behind each and every business.

The study enlisted an army of mystery shoppers to send simple clarifying questions about issues like shipping processes and size/color availability. As far as the brands knew, these questions were pivotal to the customer’s decision to purchase, and they still routinely failed to deliver satisfactory answers.

Particularly tragic about the state of email customer care is that Stella Service, the organization at the heart of the study, actually congratulates organizations like LL Bean, Gap, Zappos, Victoria’s Secret and Tiger Direct, which achieved response rates between 70.4% and 88.9%. Online support is so dire that organizations who dismiss between 10 and 30 percent of customer inquiries are lauded for their customer-centricity simply because they are not quite as bad as others!

In my recent commentary Social Customer Service Does Not Really Exist, it was obvious that I was not dismissing social customer care as a viable business strategy. Rather, I was objecting to the notion that "social" customer service is some sort of unique customer experience practice to which organizations can opt in or out at their own choosing.

In today’s multi-channel world, true customer service delivery is not about deciding to serve customers in a particular channel. It is about assuring that you are ready to efficiently and effectively support your customers in whatever medium they choose for the communication. The second your customers opt to connect with your brand via email or social media is the second your social customer experience strategy commences. The decision is made by your customers, not by your internal stakeholders.

Through various conversations with C- and VP-level customer service professionals, I have learned that e-mail is a notoriously inefficient communication channel for many brands. It is so despised that some brands deliberately tank their e-mail support operations so that customers will be discouraged from enlisting that medium for future conversations.

Though that might partially explain the abysmal aforementioned results about e-mail customer service, it is one of the most offensive, ludicrous customer management concepts imaginable.

Think about that notion for a second. Customers, for whom all organizations are supposed to be exclusively designing their experiences, are electing to contact brands via a certain channel, but because that channel is inconvenient for the brands, they consciously decide not to appropriately respond.

Instead of rebuilding their organizations to better support their customers, these organizations are instead opting to deliberately dissatisfy them. How is a concept so absurd even capable of entering the minds of customer management executives, let alone capable of dictating strategy?

Newsflash: customer service is not an optional practice. It is a fundamental tenet of running a business, and if your brand is unable to deliver the type of support customers desire in the channel they desire, your business is failing. Budget and resource excuses can go a long way in justifying some shortcomings, but when it comes to the customer experience, the most crucial component of achieving the satisfaction and loyalty that drive revenue, they hold absolutely no water.

The rules of online engagement are still being written, and it is unequivocally true that businesses still need to flesh out exactly how to respond to specific issues in specific digital channels. No one is expecting every Twitter or e-mail customer service engagement to go off without a hitch.

But the idea that businesses are in business to serve their customers is not a new or idealistic concept. It long predates the Internet and social media, and it will forever determine which businesses succeed and fail and winning their customers.

And just as it were never acceptable to ignore part of a customer’s question at the customer service counter or only answer one out of every two calls into the call center, it is not acceptable to refrain from responding to any single customer’s e-mail or Tweet. Engaging with customers and working to deliver a satisfactory response is just as important in these channels as it was in "traditional" channels, and statistics on response and resolution rate should be measured against the same benchmarks.

Most frustrating about the poor online customer service response rates is the fact that the cynical, self-interest elements responsible for driving customer experience investment are most resonant in new media.

So many businesses started paying attention to e-mail, message boards, Facebook and Twitter because the customers communicating in these channels were most capable of spreading negative brand sentiment, and yet when it comes to actually dealing with these customers, those concerns apparently melt away.

Apparently, because they are not calling for support, they are going to let disrespectful or nonexistent customer service slide. They’ll never Tweet frustration that their Tweet or Facebook posts are going repeatedly ignored!

Really, retailers?