Outsourcing customer rage.

• Author: Hall, Robert
• Position: Marketing Solutions

"... 8% of frustrated consumers say they have cursed at ecustomer-service rep in the past year; 28% said they have yelled or raised their voice. It is part era growing trend dubbed 'customer rage' by the study's authors."

--The Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2003

Customer Rage. A whole new syndrome. What on earth is causing customers to cross that line of civility? To go from disappointment and fuming frustration to actual rage? How could highly competitive companies committed to winning more revenue and profits from their customers end up following practices that increasingly drive their customers to "violent, explosive anger," as the dictionary puts it?

It takes more than just inattention, incompetent service or poor-quality products. It takes corporate botching of the human "relating"--particularly through the way companies deploy automated (or even partially automated) service-delivery systems.

These systems are not designed to cement relationship. They are roles-based and cost-averse. They use rules of logic to navigate customers down a path that should ostensibly resolve their issue while precluding opportunities for human error. They are engineered to yield the least expensive way to address the customers' issues. Increasingly, that means reducing or even eliminating human interaction.

But of course, it is virtually impossible to anticipate all possible service problems or develop a perfect set of rules. Invariably, some proportion of customer inquiries wind up with a totally unacceptable set of options, and a very human customer, not a machine, meets a dead end. The best case is that the dead-ended customers then take on the time and cost of resolving their issues.

Customers lose their vote

In essence, companies have outsourced the cost of service to customers. They didn't really reduce the cost--they just hid it and then transferred it to customers. Worse, even after customers take on that burden, they often are unable to resolve their issues via the system, and they can't access company decision-makers who could help.

The relationship between the customers and provider has gone from representative to...