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The fundamental trouble seems to be that market has collectively decided that the cost of good customer service is a value consumers are willing to lose in exch
by robbedpeter 5y ago
The fundamental trouble seems to be that market has collectively decided that the cost of good customer service is a value consumers are willing to lose in exchange for cheaper goods.
The endless consolidation of profitable businesses into ever larger corporations transforms places of business into inhuman constructs where comfort, care, and other aspects of good service get buried by unexpectedly perverse incentives:
Avoiding litigation
Maximize profit
Higher costs of tracking employee misconduct leading to ineffective internal accountability.
Once you have thousands of people acting as customer service agents, no amount of culture or rules or management can cure the natural distribution of human populations. People will find ways to do just above the minimum required effort to appear satisfactory.
Employee productivity becomes subject to pareto distributions with a tiny number of high quality workers and a majority being merely average. Throw in the modern "gig" culture where nobody stays for longer than 3 or 4 years, and good customer service becomes very expensive and vanishingly rare.
Capitalism, as she is wrote, contains fundamental structural incentives that keeps accountability to the consumer priced out. Society has imposed the burden of product safety (and other tangible effects) through legal means, but social niceties and good service are harder to legislate. Rebuilding capitalism into something far more human friendly will be one of the grand philosophical and economic challenges in the near future.
- AndrewDucker 5y agoI went to John Lewis for some blinds, thinking that they were more expensive but the service would be good. Turns out that they outsource it, and that it took three weeks to get someone out to measure my widows, three weeks to get the blinds made, and three weeks after they came back to book in a fitting. The next time round I went with a small local shop and had the whole thing done in less than a week. I'm not paying extra for worse service.
- philjohn 5y agoThe only thing I get from John Lewis is electricals these days - their 5 year warranty on TV's is definitely a nice plus point.
- maccard 5y agoRicher sounds will price match and guarantee them. They're not a local store but my one at least the staff are friendly knowledgeable and not massively pushy.
- dazc 5y agoTrue but when you're trying to price match on model numbers that are only available via John Lewis it gets a bit tricky.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dazc 5y agoA lot of John Lewis stuff is now outsourced, drop-shipped and imported from the far east. I think this is a consequence of trying trying to compete on price whilst overlooking the fact that there are a critical mass of people who are not that price sensitive. Marks and Spencer (another UK based store) made the same mistake many years ago and have been struggling for over 20 years as a consequence. I have lost count of how many big money CEOs have come and gone in the meantime - all making the same mistake of rationalising the cost base at the expense of quality and service.