A heartwarming customer service story

The state of customer service across most of the economy is dreadful. A recent delightful experience at Patagonia proves that it doesn’t have to be that way.

The sad world of customer service

As I have written about elsewhere, the more automation we introduce into the customer service experience, the less likely you are to offer excellent customer service. In fact, the self-serve options are so good that by the time someone reaches out to find a human being to help them, they are already super-frustrated and irritated.

This is against a backdrop in which customers with high expectations for quick and efficient solutions to their problems are confronting more digital confusion, a labor shortage and the chaos of robots trying to figure out what our problems really are. In the post-pandemic world, McKinsey reports that companies are struggling to bring their systems up to speed, train and retain their customer care people and provide customers with the kind of experience that will keep their loyalty.

For far too many companies, the people in their call centers and manning their front lines are looked at just as units of cost. Indeed, as Wharton’s Peter Cappelli points out in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, the way we account for people expenses only encourages skimping on investing in your human talent. We don’t treat it as an investment, we treat it as an expense, even though many CEO’s will tell you “our people are our most…