Customer Service: From Failure to Fairytale
Written by: Dr. Michael Weiss

Somewhere between the Post Office’s front door and the mailboxes of the 754 intended recipients, the mail vanished, never to be seen again. The orthopedic practice respectfully asked the Post Office to either help find the lost mail or refund the postage costs. The Post Office said no. The end.

Once upon another time, a lovely bride-to-be in the Midwest decided to hold her nuptials in Disneyland.

The young lady needed long-distance assistance with scheduling an officiant, ordering the cake and making dozens of other arrangements. Disney’s wedding coordinator promptly and cheerfully attended to each detail. Everyone lived happily ever after — especially the bride-to-be’s orthopedic surgeon father in Pittsburgh, who appreciated Disney’s commitment to making his daughter’s big day special.

The moral of the story? Good customer service is no fairytale. It’s just harder to find outside the Magic Kingdom.

A few rare companies, such as Disney, have managed to align their strategies, cultures, policies, procedures and resources in such a way as to make the customer’s experience reliably pleasant, seamless and easy.

Outcomes that look simple, however, are usually the most difficult to pull off. This makes the Disney achievement even more impressive. It also helps explain why other organizations, including the Post Office, say they’re committed to customer service but can’t quite figure out how to consistently deliver.

According to people who know more about this than me, three broad, global trends — increasing consumer expectations, falling prices and incongruous technologies — contribute to the disconnect.

The first trend — expectations — works like a Poker game, where the stakes keep getting raised. On a macro level, the better companies become at serving customers, the more customers expect good service to be the norm. Organizations need to meet this new standard in order to compete or, if they want to differentiate based on service, find ways to make their customers even happier. Thus, the cycle continues.

The second trend is what makes the first one such a challenge. Customers not only expect more, but they also now pay less. Prices worldwide continue to fall, forcing whole industries into cost containment mode. Like supply, production, labor and business costs, delivering excellent customer service represents another expense — which companies may or may not be able to recoup, depending on the product, the environment and the customer.

Basic economics necessitates that organizations pick, choose or split the difference, as in more phone trees and fewer phone receptionists.

Finally, technology has given us mind-blowing capabilities and turned cumbersome tasks into glorious efficiencies. It’s also the main reason we now have what’s called the failure industry. This emerging segment of the world economy exists to help customers resolve incongruities between old and new technologies. Another name for this would be technical support.

In this case, the term "failure" isn’t personal. It’s techno-speak, and it simply means that one technology doesn’t jibe easily with another, creating some undesirable consequence for the customer.

Failure in this context is the reason you can’t connect your new computer to your old printer. It’s also what happens when you tell a patient that you can’t schedule his appointment because your server is down.

I’m not bringing all of this up to let the Post Office off the hook. It still needs to address the problem of our lost mail.
I’m bringing this up because health care is the ultimate customer-service industry, with its own infamous twists on the aforementioned trends. If the pattern holds, it will only get harder to deliver on customer service while doing all of the other things we need to do to keep our organizations strong.

How will we fare?

Hard to tell, but I have hope in the intentions and resourcefulness of health-care providers. In honor of my daughter’s nuptials, let me state it like this: I like to think we’ll earn our mouse ears yet.

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