Effective destruction of Customer relationship through efficiency initiatives
Relationship – relatively long-term association between two or more people or social entities (?) (italic part is mine). These can be voluntary and cherished, or forced and resentful. Wikipedia does not provide generic definition for Customer Relationship outside of CRM concept, but I bet that if it had, it would not focused on involuntary and resentful associations. And yet modern organizations keep investing billions of dollars (and other monetary units) in creating such emotions among their customers.
Doc Searls wrote about this disconnect
For evidence, look no farther than two of the most annoying developments in the history of business: 1) loyalty cards; and 2) the outsourcing of customer service to customers themselves.
Never mind the inefficiencies and outright stupidities involved in loyalty programs (for example, giving you a coupon discounting the next purchase of the thing you just bought – now for too much). Just look at the conceits involved. Every one of these programs acts as if “belonging” to a vendor is a desirable state – that customers are actually okay with being “acquired”, “locked-in” and “owned” like slaves. Meanwhile, “customer service” has been automated to a degree that is beyond moronic.
Can technology replace care without destroying “long-term” association between social entities? I would imagine in a context of involuntary association it could work just fine – automating prisons without diminishing security is a reasonably good example.
The technology is a “channel” for delivery of ..fill in the blanks, product, service, care or any other “content”. Although some would argue that all of these are the same and is the reason of why this associations (relationships) has formed on the first place. So from this perspective the strategy of more channels with less content, can be cheaper to construct and maintain, but ultimately leads to erosion of relationship, and as such based on very bad economics of reducing cost per transaction at the expense of Total Customer Value.
All the chats were 99% unhelpful and in some ways were comically absurd. The real message that ran through the whole exchange was, You figure it out.
Sez one commenter on a Slashdot thread,
There’s a Linksys cable modem I know of that has a recent firmware, and by recent I mean last year or so. Linksys wont release the firmware as they expect only the cable companies to do so. The cable companies only release it to people who bought their cable modems from them directly. So there are thousands of people putting up with bugs because they bought their modem retail and have no legitimate access to the updated firmware.
What if I pulled this firmware from a cable company owned modem and wrote these people a simple installer? Would the company sing my praises then?
The real issue here is that people frequent web boards for support because the paid phone support they get is beyond worthless. Level 1 people just read scripts and level 2 or 3 people cant release firmwares because of moronic policies. No wonder people are helping themselves. These companies should be ashamed of providing service on such a low level, not happy that someone has taken up the slack for them.
It shows that Customer Care, for these organizations, really is an unavoidable evil, rather than an opportunity to build relationship and as such the cost is primary consideration. In other words they don’t want association with you, they just want your money – and this is a very expensive way to build business considering the cost of Customer Development.
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