Managers - Post Pandemic #5 - What the Hell Happened to Customer Service?

Once upon a time business competed mainly on one aspect of their business: value. Was the quality of the product worth the price they were charging? Was the product of such sterling quality that the price was out of reach for most consumers? Was the price super-affordable but the product broke down soon after purchase? Companies looked for the balance between price and quality and battled with competitors on that basis. Then came Walmart. Most retailers couldn't compete with Walmart on price, and were often selling the same products, so they had to emphasize that ephemeral aspect of the buying experience: customer service. 

The phrase "the customer is always right" predated Walmart, but surely came into its own as a strategy to lure people away from the Bentonville Behemoth. No action was too servile if it meant keeping a customer from defecting to the low price leader down the street. Retailers in effect trained their customers to be assholes, since that was a surefire way to get what you wanted.  Customer service in the Walmart era meant that customers could scream profanity at retail workers or outlandish demands and managers would acquiesce afraid of losing just one customer. The whole system was out of balance.  

The roots of change can be traced back to 2015, when the unemployment rate started to flirt with the 3% level. It accelerated when, during the pandemic and immediately after, when service workers realized that they had the power to set the terms of their own employment. Knowing that if they quit or were fired, another job with similar pay could be had in short order, many did quit if they didn't like the work environment. The management-employee dynamic became more balanced, if not skewed toward the employee. Overall, this was a good thing. Employees with a solid work ethic were no longer content to be enslaved by their employers. The problem is that not all employees had a solid work ethic.

Let's divert for a moment to define "customer service". I would define it as giving the customers what you advertised you would give them - this includes stock levels; and interacting with them in a civil, polite, manner - including dropping personal conversations or cell phone use when a customer needs some help. In my view a friendly demeanor is a plus, but not required. I'm not shopping in your store looking for friends. 

Back to comparative work ethic. 

Mainly due to the perception among managers that "nobody wants to work" and various corollaries as well as the very real low unemployment rate, managers are afraid to fire bad employees. No manager wants to be short staffed. Staff has to work harder to make up for missing people, or work simply doesn't get done because there aren't enough people to do it. Corporate executives don't want to hear what they term excuses and usually are not interested in altering expectations to accommodate the new reality. When I ran a grocery store the standard in the in-store bakery was for an employee to take a customer's doughnut request and remove it from the case and bag it up for them. The result was that one employee was tied up during peak times and one customer with a large order could cause a line - when customers would be just as happy to get their own doughnuts. Eventually, after many years, the corporate office figured it out, but not because anyone at the store level complained about it. 

So what do managers do? Two things: (1) They hire using the "warm body" principle and (2) They put up with what should be unacceptable behavior from employees. #1 is because they are in a hurry to get someone hired, and #2, they are terrified that someone is going to quit and they'll be short staffed until they can hire another warm body that incidentally they don't have the time or the staff to train properly. 

Employees at  entry-level jobs are not stupid. It doesn't take them long to see that there are no consequences to not doing the job that they were hired to do. A bad employee will just get worse seeing that management ignores them and a good employee will soon see that working hard and following company policy just means that they're doing the work of the bad employee. Overall productivity and customer service levels plummet. Whose fault is this state of affairs? The managers.

When I say "managers", it's ultimately the fault of the level of management that makes decisions. A store manager has to have the guts to set standards and stick by them. If an employee is not doing their job, the manager can't be terrified that the sky will fall if the employee terminated and they are short-staffed. Corporate management has to be flexible enough to allow their retail-level managers the freedom to adjust expectations in response to changing situations, and not wait for months of meetings to green-light a decision that the leaders on the front lines know must be done. Earlier in this post I mentioned that in the Walmart era companies trained their customers to be assholes. In this post-pandemic era, companies have trained their employees to be bad employees. The solution isn't to update the employee handbook, or to embark on a search for the perfect employee - rules are ineffective if they're not enforced and "perfect" employees quickly devolve into horrible employees if they see that being a bad employee is the easier path. 

It's not an employee problem, it's a manger problem.