So I was perusing the wonderful pages of
LOLfed, as i do now and again, and I came across a minor article that reminded me once again about certain thoughts I've had for a while now ("a while" being only a relevant timeframe in terms of "several years prior to the current economic crisis").
Article:
Expansion of Xtreem Effishunsee continues to spread to retail. Now, there's actually nothing new in this. These practices have been spreading throughout the service industry on all fronts for well over a decade, if not longer. But it it is a good starter point for discussion.
There are two aspects to this: 1 - the social aspect, and 2 - the business aspect.
Now the social aspect is the more visceral of the two. On the surface you have anecdotal comments about employees not being able to "talk to customers" etc., and you have customers who are unhappy at "being treated like a number". But there is in fact a real social issue when the small conversations that make up a significant part of our personal daily interactions are reduced to pre-scripted decision trees. As the world heads into what may turn out to be the worst financial crisis in nearly a century, interpersonal nastiness will only exacerbate a bad situation. The spiral will deepen as people in shitty jobs will come under tremendous pressure to avoid losing said shitty job and under tremendous pressure to conform to performance markers formulated by the boss-man. In worst-case scenarios, those performance markers will be unobtainable.
It's probably hyperbolic (hyperbole? me? nooo.), but what is is the cost to our society to encourage the calculated industrialization of human interaction?
Is this something we should be looking at? Is it even possible to do so in any meaningful way? You can unionize workers, and you can form consumer's groups, but they don't address the root issue of the subsumption of intangibles to pure mathematics. Of course, the species has been losing that battles for centuries if not a whole hell of a lot longer. Survival will always trump enjoyment, at least in the long run.
On the other hand, the business aspect has some interesting points going on. The crux of the matter is that this is an attempt to treat the service industry as a whole like the manufacturing industry. But the manufacturing industry creates products with defined physical specifications, where the service industry processes transactions and creates goodwill between consumers and producers. Sometimes you can quantify this, but it's a far less reliable thing than verifying a physical manufacturing standard.
There is a paradox in applying industrial efficiency measures to interpersonal interaction. A company saves money in an immediate and measureable way, but at a cost that is difficult if not impossible to calculate. A business will suffer real and definite losses if it delivers poor customer service and alienates people, but in a falling economy (or in industries that operate as quasi-monopolies), you will still see a growth in "nickle-and-diming" of customers and staff. At the root of all that small-minded penny-pinching is the fact that managers are trading small, immediate, measureable gains for longer-term losses that will rarely show up on a balance sheet in a way that anyone would actually answerable for them. Who cares if your customers throw away their brand loyalty? We just saved $15 000 on fractional seconds (P.S. I want a bonus)!
Additionally, a company faces other less-defined costs. There IS an upper threshold for employee stress, beyond which you get into bizarro world. The more strung out your employees feel, the more likely you will face increases in absenteeism (be it for sick days or 'fuck-The-Man' days) and high turnover/training/hiring costs. Hell, even if you pay your employees no benefits and treat them like toilet paper, this STILL represents an increase in costs.
And yet, customer loyalty is something that predates modern industry. It predates the creation of modern markets, corporations, trade guilds, bazaars, and damn near any other primitive financial institution you'd care to name. Trade loyalty by definition dates to the first time two individuals traded anything a second time. Loyalty can quite possibly be described as the oldest tool for customer retention in the book. But it takes time, it takes finesse, and most importantly, it must be tailored to the individual customer. And the only person who can DO that tailoring is the person that customer is talking to.
In my experience (omg anecdotal evidence, better crucify me now), it takes an
extremely skilled person to be able to survive and provide good service under harsh time constraints. If time standards are not harsh, they are immaterial - which is to say, you can only increase efficiency if your workforce is actually working faster than they might have otherwise. Some individuals who might be able to do it in the allotted time normally (e.g. if there was no allotment) become uncomfortable under the pressure and may perform poorly (either taking longer or by turning terse/nasty), and some people just
can't do it at all. While the easy response is "These people should not be employed and should be thrown out by their employers. No company should settle for subpar workers.", one needs to remember that most of our economy and job market is now service based. Those highly skilled bright-lights every manager craves often have other skills and find employment in better things and at the wages paid for most customer service positions, you'll be very lucky if you can get "the best of the rest".
So what then? Industrialize the whole process and hope your short-term savings offset increased costs? Take the plunge and allow your employees a freer hand? I won't pretend it's not a tough choice. Selling the latter option to a skeptical upper management sounds like Pinky saying "Trust me Brain, what could go wrong?" in some people's ears.
I mean, I've said it before, but it's worth stating again: I'm not a Luddite. My personal belief is that machines should do things that machines are suited to and that humans should do things that humans are suited to. Any attempt to force square pegs in fleshy holes and vice-versa is foolish and grossly inefficient. In fact this inefficiency is pervasive, affecting just about every industry I've observed, from medicine to fast food. The instinct is so wrongheaded it boggles the mind. They try to make machines more human-like and humans more machine-like and folks, it's back-asswards.
When I am at work, if there is a process that can be easily automated, I want to see that process automated. If I can be replaced by a machine, or my job made redundant because of gains in real efficiency, well, I for one welcome our new machine overlords. A talented person will always be given another role in the company or can find work elsewhere. But we haven't yet reached the point where we've made ourselves totally obsolete. And until the day we have true, perfectly functioning AI, this will continue to be impossible (and maybe not even then). To go back to my word-dump above, any attempt to introduce IVRs (those voice-answer, automatic answering systems) have met with extremely mixed results. And even when you have high-functioning IVRs, people feel no connection to them.
Total automation is not the answer, but neither is a lax, do-what-you-want atmosphere. Automated tools to help the customer service agent do their job quickly and efficiently will always be appreciated by both employees and clients. Perhaps the answer is simply moderation (my favourite answer), but with most of the costs of failure hidden, I'm buggered if I know how corporations will learn that lesson. Yes, there are successes that people point to, and bless their hearts for doing things
right, but when lesser men try to copy success without truly understanding that success, well those copies will be similarly inferior.
I don't have an answer here, I'm just kind of rambling out a discussion point.
EDIT: Why the fuck did I type all that out on neo-pyoko?
