Customer service isn’t dead. It may be hard to believe, what with so many websites dedicated to customer service ratings, all it takes is a quick scan of the “Yelps” of the Internet to see that the glowing reviews are far more scarce than the scathing ones.
Good reviews are such a rarity in fact, review sites like Yelp.com will actually filter out the reviews and responses from people whom open an account just to post a good review, determining these reviews to be most likely a friend or someone who has a vested interest in the place succeeding.
Sadly, this means if someone were to log on to give a server a glowing review, it would most likely be rendered invisible to others viewing that particular venue.
To put it simply, customer servers that exhibit a complete lack of talent get a big old spotlight, but the ones that do a superb job get relegated to the shadows.
One of the main problems with the typical “review” is that it is used to state a problem with that particular venue, and is very rarely implemented in a way to give kudos to the person whom you interacted with. This kind of “reviewing” plagues the marketplace of nearly every service oriented job by only bringing forth the worst of a place of business or a customer server and rendering the positives of a place nonexistent.
The detriment with this system, is not the reviews, but the reviewers. Humans as a species respond to negative stimuli far more readily than that of positive stimuli. We are much more likely to pursue a course of comment if we have been “mistreated” than if we had been expertly taken care of. Its enough to say people are very unlikely to ask to see their waiters manager if they’ve been doing a good job.
There is more to the customer service industry than reviews however, for in its simplest form customer service is the interaction between one person and another. Sadly, reviews tell very little of the actual story. As a society our standards for customer service have been set quite low. Anyone who’s had to be in a Department of Motor Vehicles office for any period of time will know that being amicable is very low on the list of priorities.
The “take a number” approach to customer service has left a negative stain on the psyche of would-be customers.
It doesn’t really matter what the venue is, it doesn’t really matter who the person serving you is, it could be the cashier at a clothing store, or the waiter at a nice family restaurant, people will go out of their way to be downright mean to the person who is tending to their needs. It is this that is really hurting customer service most of all.
