CUSTOMER DIS-SERVICE
We’re doing all the work for them
By David Drum
Perhaps nobody’s noticed yet, but we’re living in an age of customer dis-service, a demotic new machine age.
In industry after industry, employees who once interfaced with the public are being disappeared and society is the worse for it. Just by being human, and interacting with customers, customer service employees can make life more pleasant with a pleasant smile or a helping hand.
Ever more rapidly, real people are being replaced by cold, heartless machines that make us do their work for them. The machines annoy us, use us, don’t pay us for our labor, and don’t ever reward us with a smile.
This continuing avalanche of “labor-saving” machines, if they can be called that, are not saving our labor. Giant corporations are forcing customers to do more of what should be their work while simultaneously killing thousands of jobs.
Customer service? Let’s call this what it is. It’s customer dis-service.
NO-SERVICE SERVICE STATIONS
Several years ago, if you wanted to buy gasoline, you’d pull into what used to be called a service station and a real person would walk out to your car.
“Fill her up?” perhaps they’d ask. “Check your oil?”
You’d tell them what type of service you wanted and they’d do it. Sometimes they’d pump your gas, check your oil, and maybe even wash your windshield, too.
You’d pay them and maybe thank them, and then you’d be on your way. These were small, sometimes pleasant, very human exchanges — what used to be called servicing the customer.
Today, alas, there is no more service at service stations. You pull up to the gas pump. No human being ever comes out to speak to you or ask what you’d like. If there is a human at the modern service station, that person is often barricaded behind a protective plexiglass shield with a small opening at the bottom to take your money or credit card.
For good reason they are generally no longer called service stations. They’re mostly called gas stations.
Each gasoline pump is embedded with a machine that accepts your credit card or ATM card. You pay them money; you pump your own gas. You check your own oil. And you wash your own windshield, if they happen to have the necessary tools available.
Basically, American consumers are paying whoever owns these machines for the privilege of allowing us to do what used to be their work, while we fatten their bottom line.
We’re into a customer service machine age. The first remote access gasoline pump was introduced in 1964, but they’re now ubiquitous. At every gas station in America, that attendant who filled your tank years ago has already been replaced by a machine.
The aptly-named Automatic Teller Machine or ATM was introduced in the US in 1969, around the same time as the mechanized gasoline pump. Almost overnight, it seemed, friendly American bank tellers were replaced by faceless machines, with their customers doing the work once done by real bank tellers.
Now they’re coming for the grocery store checkers.
SELF-SERVICE CHECKOUTS
In many large grocery store chains, so-called “self-service” checkout stands are popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain.
First introduced in 1986, more complicated self-service checkout machines are in the process of rapidly replacing the human supermarket checkers, the individuals who once rang up your groceries and took your money, card, or check.
Self-service checkouts are also doing away with what once were called “box boys,” young people who boxed or bagged your groceries for you. If you needed help, the kids even occasionally helped carry your groceries to your car.
While checkout lanes employing real human checkers and box boys (or box girls) still exist, grocery stores are rapidly adding checkout machines to replace them. Long lines at check-stands or a desire to complete a purchase quickly can stimulate a move to the self-service machines for time-pressed customers, so people in a hurry have little choice but to learn how to use them.
Self-service checkout machines make customers do all the work, of course. And buying groceries is unfortunately more complex than withdrawing money or pumping gas.
Customers have to locate the bar codes or QR codes on individual items, and scan them into the machine which is sometimes not easy. Purchasing fresh produce, you often must look up your item on a screen, or weigh it if necessary. And of course, you have to bag all your groceries by yourself and carry them out of the store. Where I live, we have to pay extra for the bags, if we didn’t bring your own.
Self-service machines can be frustrating to use, and the experience is neutral at best, and often annoying or unpleasant. However, some industry experts claim self-service checkout machines reduce labor costs by about two-thirds.
Welcome to the Customer Service Machine Age. The Age of Customer dis-Service.
Good people are losing their jobs all over the place. And when machines replace human beings who help customers, companies shift what used to be their work right onto you and human connections slip away.
Have many of us even noticed that we see no more occasional friendly smiles of recognition, or friendly hellos in department stores, where actual sales clerks seem to have gone extinct, and a single over-worked person frantically operates the cash register. Shopping is rapidly becoming a grayer, less human exchange.
That’s progress, you say? Why do we stand for this?
Anthropologists tell us that human society evolved over thousands of years, with humans primarily living in groups of about 50–100 people. Cooperation between hunter-gatherer peoples is at the heart of our evolution as a civilized species, with some people hunting, some gathering, some cooking, etc. Sadly, as we evolve, we are losing our human-to-human connections.
And in the future, when we shop entirely on the internet and even the chat boxes are run by machines, we will be doing every bit of our own customer service. When we set out to buy something, we’ll hardly ever see a friendly human face at all.
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David Drum is a writer based in Los Angeles.