The way in which we are communicating with one another keeps changing and changing. I suppose someone still writes dictated memos and I suppose someone likes to visit the home office, but more and more we work de-centralized and remotely and communicate electronically. Instead of us having more human contact, we are having much less. The trend continues.
There was an interesting article on the Quartz website (qz.com) by Max Nisen (December 24, 2014) entitled: “More proof that no one wants or listens to your voicemails.”
The piece states:
“Many young people will agree that voicemail—once essential in business and personal communications—has in just a few years become basically irrelevant and actually quite annoying. So Coca-Cola’s November memo announcing that it would disconnect landline voicemails at its headquarters comes as a vindication for those trying to convince the last holdouts among families, friends, and colleagues that voicemail is an exceedingly bad way to get in touch.
The company is specifically getting rid of old-school voicemail lines, the ones where you have to listen or skip through previous messages to get to the latest. The cost savings from the move aren’t huge—less than $100,000, according to Coke—but there’s an efficiency benefit. Usage was declining, and the company wanted increase productivity.”
I would agree that voicemail has become a giant pain. Even as an old-school guy myself, I hate voicemail. There are choices upon choices upon choices, and not one choice is ever quite what we really need. Worse, when we think we have found the right “person” and we leave our impassioned messages in VM we never have an expectation that our call will be returned.
How many times have we heard ourselves saying? “I just want to talk to another human being!”
It is beginning to appear more and more unlikely. In fact, the new message when we call into the Coke headquarters will tell us to send our questions via email or a text message. Of course, there is no guarantee that anyone will ever read or respond to those either!
Part of the problem (if you have ever used VM in your office) is that there is a whole boatload of prompts, passwords, numbers and jazz you have to go through to get your messages.
However, those problems have been streamlined with the newer systems. As the article so very wisely points out:
“There are still times when a phone call is the best way to communicate. But if a person doesn’t pick up her phone, it’s probably for a reason that would also prevent her checking voicemail—a meeting, perhaps. But chances are, she has probably mastered the art of the under-the-table text message.”
In other words, it has become easier to ignore or avoid people than deal with them. This is true at Coke and hundreds, if not thousands of other companies.
What changes? Customer service.
As a society, we have come to fall in love with technology. I love my technology too. For example, if I’m driving along, and get helplessly lost, I like the idea of asking my smartphone for help to get me un-lost. Then there are the many apps we use – and they are unlimited, it seems, in their scope and they can help me do everything from ordering pizza to finding a rental car.
However, technology still does not negate the fact that sometimes I need to talk to a human. It usually comes under the banner of customer service. We, who have either grown up with –, or adopted technology, like to know that sometimes our communication or our need to communicate means something to the person at the other end of the phone. For example, when my internet service goes down or the trip I thought I just booked, apparently has not booked.
If I really need to talk to someone or I am being intentionally avoided, I am also caught up in a case of bad ethical behavior on the part of the employee. If no one cares about my problem or question, what does that tell me about their customer service?
Will we get to the point as a society where customer service no longer matters? It is a hard question to answer at this point.
It would be interesting to do a study of Coke for example, where we were to observe what would happen if their corporate travel department could not communicate with anyone in airline customer service. Or consider if their HR department was unable to communicate with any of their insurance providers. What would happen if they could not reach their bankers?
Maybe it would have no effect on operations, or perhaps they might get so frustrated and angry that no one cared for their business, that they would look for new “vendors.” As to the future, who knows? However, as long as there is competition there is always the risk of intentionally doing less rather than more to satisfy customers. In other words, there is always Pepsi.
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