Some articles have a long shelf
life. Case in point: This BusinessWeek cover story from four years ago
called Why Service Stinks. Bottom line is that, like everything else in
the US, and to a lesser (but growing) extent elsewhere in the West,
your value as a consumer (and as a citizen) is a direct function of
your wealth and your propensity to spend it. So if the computer of the
person who's serving you says you're the buying rep for a ten billion
dollar company, believe you're going to get great service. But it that
computer says you've only bought one thing from them before, and it
required service under warranty: "Sorry, we seem to have a bad
connection." *click*
This is part of a larger malaise that tries to make us believe, for the
benefit of the corporatist aristocracy that owns and runs more of our
lives every day, that we are only
what we buy. If it's easier for you to buy a replacement for the
shoddy item you bought, than to return it or get it fixed, then if you
can afford to do so you'll replace it. The vendor will therefore make sure it's easier to buy new than
repair or return it under warranty. And if you can't afford to buy a
new one, the vendor doesn't want to know you.
Companies
know just how good a customer you are--and unless you're a high roller,
they would rather lose you than take the time to fix your problem,
says BusinessWeek. They explain how companies allocate service reps
according to the amount of business they get from each customer group
(which is why, for example, corporate Dell customers are routed to one
'help line' while 'retail and home' customers get the Indian help
line). They call this practice of triaging customers by wealth and
spending habits corporate apartheid
and that's a perfect analogy for it. The world in which corporate
aristocrats live today is increasingly separated from all contact with
the masses: Private chauffeurs, private rooms in private clubs and
restaurants, private schools, private jets (and Elite Class
perks when they're forced to travel on the same planes as menials),
private rooms in private health care facilities. The people who live in
this bubble of fawning privilege have no idea what life in the real
world is like: they never see it, and they never have to deal with it.
This remains my #1 concern with the concept of The Support Economy
(though its author, Ms. Zuboff, was gracious in trying to refute this
concern in personal correspondence with me): That only the very wealthy
few will be able to afford it.
The BusinessWeek article shows that the customer experience is a
function of wealth and spending no matter what industry is supplying
the product or service: financial institutions, brokerage houses,
retailers, machinery manufacturers, phone companies, airlines,
insurance companies, you name it. It's no accident that the code for
spending volume on many computerized customer information systems is
called Status or Class or Value.
A Maytag exec sees nothing wrong with this. People who buy top-of-the-line "not only want more service, they deserve it", he says. If he had been referring to a racial class rather than an economic one, such a remark would provoke outrage.
BusinessWeek foresees a future in which "the service divide may become
much more transparent. The trade-off between price and service could be
explicit, and customers will be able to choose where they want to fall
on that continuum. In essence, customer service will become just
another product for sale." So the discrimination will depend not on
your wealth or past spending volume, but on what you're willing to pay
now for 'superior' service, or to jump the queue. Is that fairer? Do we
all deserve the same level of service, or should service depend on what
you can afford? Where do you draw the line? In Canada, we (most of us,
anyway) consider the idea of the rich jumping the queue for critical
medical services to be morally repugnant, but in the US this is
accepted as natural, just 'the way things are'. So much for "give me
your huddled masses".
I remember a few years ago I was waiting in a long customs and
immigration line-up in a sweltering third-world airport terminal at 1
a.m. chatting with the son of the British High Commissioner to that
country who'd come in on the same flight. Suddenly, a boy came rushing
up to me, asked my name, and then said "Give me your passport." When I
looked alarmed, he pointed to a mezzanine gallery where the friend who
was meeting me on my arrival was waving and nodding. The boy took my
hand, walked me to the front of the long line, whispered in the ear of
the customs agent, and I was whisked through, no questions asked, and
into my friend's waiting car. "In this country, it's who you know, not
how much money you have, that counts", she said. I was embarrassed and
astonished. But is this any worse than the system that rushes
first-class airplane passengers in many cities through shorter, less
confrontational customs and immigration line-ups?
Call me naive, and idealistic, but all kinds of apartheid offend me. The wealthy and the connected don't deserve
any better service than the rest of us. To the corporations that
believe that service should depend on what the customer's 'worth', and
the rest should either self-serve or go away, my response is: Welcome to my Boycott List. Good-bye.
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