Customer Disservice

My sister-in-law has been doing some sleuthing into the fee-scheduling practices of her current (soon to be former) bank, and her findings are interesting, infuriating, frustrating, and (I'm afraid) fairly typical. (I won't name the bank, but it's the bank of our continent... and the next one down...)

Devious and hidden fees aside (par for the course, you know?), what was particularly upsetting was the way that she was "served" when calling the bank's customer service number. There's so much here, I'll make a list:

1) Attitude. The attitude of the person on the other end of the line communicated that their job would be so much easier if it weren't for all of these customers calling all day long and demanding service. That's the job! That's what you're paid for! Similarly bemusing was the fact that the length of the call (to be fair, it was a long phone call with lots of questions) seemed to be the most irritating thing to this alleged service provider. If you work answering customer service calls from 9-5, what does it matter if you handle 5 1-hour calls or 30 20-minute calls? I can think of many reasons to consider either one of those scenarios to be "more work" than the other, but the fact that there is a substantial wait time to speak to a human leads me to believe that my sister-in-law was keeping them from answering another (potentially annoying) call, not from taking a donut break. Of course the people calling don't know what's going on and are not helpful... that's why they're calling! If they knew the information they're asking you about, they wouldn't call! It's like a doctor complaining about how they just see sick people all day. Yeah, the people who aren't sick are at work! The people who understand how their banking services work are not going to call you to talk about last night ball game.

2) Deception and/or Incompetence. The person (or persons, she made several calls) she talked to gave her information about the fees levied upon her account that was false. There are 2 options for why this was so: 1) the person lied, or 2) the person was misinformed. If the person lied, that's just wrong! Did they lie because they were instructed to lie by management, or did they lie of their own volition to get this person off the phone?
But what if it was an honest mistake? The person just had the wrong information? Well, it seems to me that this is a failing higher up in the hierarchy: it is the responsibility of management to insure that employees tasked with disseminating information to customers be supplied with accurate information! I'd be willing to bet that the accountants who handle monthly statements are higher up on the list of people who need to know important fee-schedule information than customer service phone-jockeys, and that's wrong.
Regardless of where the deception or incompetence began in the chain of command, it seems reasonable to me to dismiss any fees levied against a customer if an employee of the firm whose responsibility it is to communicate factual information to the customer tells them that there are no fees. Decisions are made based on the assumption that the information received is correct: whether to transfer money to another account or another bank, for example. Money lost because of that incorrect information should be refunded (with interest). To say that the regulations on the books take precedence over those communicated by human beings employed by the bank is to abdicated responsibility in an inexcusable manner.

The real problem is that customer service is embedded into what is essentially a bureaucracy. You start out wanting to make sure that all of your employees and customers are treated fairly, and if your organization becomes large enough, you need to develop some protocols and guidelines to make sure that the same procedures are followed for everyone. It's intended to serve well and serve without bias. Then, you get so large that you need to hire people just to make sure these procedures are carried out.

The fundamental flaw in any bureaucracy appears the instant a bureaucrat understands their primary function to be serving the procedures and rules rather than serving the employees and customers. The rules exist because they were deemed at some point to be the best tools for serving the needs of employees and customers while minimizing time and cost expenditure to the employer. A bureaucrat must realize, however, that cases will come up on occassion where the original purpose for instituting the rules and procedures are disserved if those same rules and procedures are followed to the letter. Bureaucrats must feel that they have the flexibility to amend procedures on occassion when they don't serve their intended purpose.

Once a bureaucracy is entrenched, however, rules and procedures are developed to serve the structure of the bureaucracy, with service to employees and customers no longer part of the rubric. Any manager of an organization that seeks to serve the public or their own employees must be willing to review the machinations of bureacracy on occassion and weed out those places where the machine is serving itself at the expense of those it was built to serve. What do you do if the robot you built to mow your lawn ends up needing to burn your lawn to create fuel for itself? Well, you go back to the garage and pull out the old manual mower, or you let the lawn grow out of control. Neither of these is an attractive option, but that shouldn't stop us from shutting down the destructive grass-burning mower.
"Bureacracy" doesn't have to be a pejorative, and the eventual dissolution of customer service doesn't have to be inevitable. It might require more time, money, or even more thought. It's sad that in the current economic climate, that's a deathblow to treating those we ostensibly serve like annoying fuel.

- "No, wait, I'll go upstairs and hit some guests."