Whatever happened to customer service from a real person?
"I'm sorry, I did not understand your response. Try again."
Such chirping from those interactive voice response machines, for instance, is one of the most irritating forms of automated customer service, say consumers and experts alike.
"Consumers say, 'I hate this! I hate this!'" said Bob Caruso, call-center program director for J.D. Power & Associates, Westlake Village, Calif., which surveys customer satisfaction.
"I'm sitting here right now with a client in the insurance business who is considering scrapping the IVR and going back to humans," said Caruso, who declined to name the client. "Businesses are struggling to find the right balance of self-service on the phone vs. talking to a real person."
Whether irritating or efficient, the self-service trend in all its forms is imbedded and expanding in the U.S. consumer economy, say experts.
"It is growing, and the amount of transaction revenue is growing," said Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting Group, a market research firm in Franklin, Tenn. He estimates the value of transactions at self-serve kiosks and checkout counters will approach $608 billion this year -- up dramatically from about $324 billion in 2005.
But Emily Marburger's transaction -- a flight to Los Angeles on Delta Air Lines in March -- led to a snowballing customer-service disaster.
Marburger, 20, of the Lower Hill District returned from her trip to discover Delta double-debited her bank card for her ticket. She called the airline's customer-service line and was put on hold for 30 minutes. Two weeks of daily calls stretched into three hours of total hold time.
"Finally I got someone, who told me to mail (Delta) my bank statement, ticket confirmation and phone bill with the minutes highlighted," Marburger said. "Then, I got an automated e-mail response that said give them the name of the passengers I bought tickets for, but I didn't buy any other tickets! And I kept getting the same e-mail over and over!"
Airlines generally have been leaders in automating customer service, and their customers are the most apt to gravitate to self-serve options, say experts. "Almost everyone who travels has been trained to use (ticket) kiosks," Buzek said.
"Being empowered to print your own boarding pass has improved wait times in line. So now, those lines are more for customers with problems, like having to rebook or change a trip," said Jamey Power IV, senior vice president of J.D. Power.
Southwest Airlines in 2003 was one of the first airlines to install kiosks with touch screens for passengers to pull their own boarding passes. Now, the carrier known for its customer service has kiosks at all 64 airports it serves.
"We'd always been a touchy-feely company. But about 90 percent of people seem to want to do things themselves," said Colleen Barrett, president emeritus of Southwest. "So we became high-tech and high-touch."
Southwest has actively promoted booking flights online, skipping the reservations agent. About 78 percent of its tickets nowadays are issued online -- which led to "way too much capacity and too many seats in our reservations centers," Barrett said.
As a result, Southwest in 2003 consolidated its nine reservations centers into six, and half of its 2,000 reservations agents accepted an "early-out" offer to leave the company, she said. Introduction of the kiosks, however, did not cost any customer-service jobs.
US Airways began automating ticketing and boarding at Pittsburgh International and other airports in 2003. But while the addition of boarding pass readers at the gates sped up boarding, it led to about 200 fewer gate-agent jobs here and elsewhere, said union officials. Similarly, the introduction of ticketing kiosks at Pittsburgh International cut some 50 local ticket-agent jobs.
"They were pushing automation and card readers everywhere they could to reduce the amount of employees," said Chris Fox, vice president of Communications Workers of America Local 13302 in Green Tree.
Self-service is hardly new. Its first appearance was the now-antique gumball machine in the 1880s in New York and London, said a study by FischerJordan, a management consulting firm in New York. Years later came vending machines for soda, snacks and cigarettes.
A leap in self-serve technology arrived with the automated teller machine, which began dispensing cash by 1970. ATMs increased to about 90,000 by 1990 and number about 400,000 today. They enable customers to accept deposits, transfer funds between accounts and transact other business.
"Overall, automation has improved service. But that doesn't mean it's universal," Power said. "My 70-year-old aunt likes the idea of going to her favorite teller at the bank."
Demographics factors into who tends to use those self-serve checkout counters. In recent years, their touch screens and bar-code scanners have cropped up at many local department stores, home-improvement stores and grocery stores.
"The self-serve checkout phenomenon is more generational," said David Hogan, chief information officer for the National Retail Federation in Washington. "My parents, who are in their mid-60s and early 70s, won't even go near one."
Giant Eagle Inc. of O'Hara installed self-serve checkout in 14 stores in February 2001. It now has them in 157 of its 223 stores in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland. Between 8 and 46 percent of their transactions are done by customers, depending on store size and configuration, said Giant Eagle spokesman Dick Roberts.
"I've been using self-serve to check out for a few years. It's quicker and it's convenient," said Sarah Nicholas, 21, of Sewickley, as she swiped about 15 items over the bar-code scanner at a Giant Eagle store in Ohio Township.
"I've grown up with computers, so I was used to the touch screen," said Nicholas. "But I could see how some people wouldn't like it if they're always used to having somebody do it for you."
"I hate technology," said Ellen Schall, 50, of the North Side, as she sped through one of the store's six self-serve counters. "But once I started to use this, I never went back to the other way."
Many times, however, the self-servers can't find some produce item on the screen, and the speedy checkout grinds to a halt, said both shoppers.
"When people get stuck, a voice comes on and says, 'Help is on the way,'" said Tony Mollica, the director of Giant Eagle's Ohio Township store.
Then, a roving clerk -- a real, live person -- comes over to assist.
No comments:
Post a Comment