DEL.ICIO.USCustomers shouldn’t suffer in silence, lawyer says
Self-appointed expert seeks bad, good stories about service for how-to book.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Have you been bumped from a flight? Belittled by a hotel clerk? Or stewed in a doctor’s waiting room? Then Rupert Barkoff wants to hear all about it.
By day, Barkoff is a lawyer at Kilpatrick Stockton in Atlanta and a national expert on business franchising. But his hobby — his golf, as he puts it — is dissecting customer service horror stories, starting with his own.
Alexander Acosta/aacosta@ajc.com
Business franchising attorney Rupert Barkoff is collecting customer service stories for a book.
The 60-year-old “self-appointed expert on customer service” is on a mission to collect 1,000 customer service stories. Barkoff created a Web site called anecdatabook.com to collect the tales, and he aims to write a book about the findings, a how-to tome that coaches people (and businesses) about how to right customer service wrongs.
He has co-authored a book on franchising and was a technical adviser on “Franchising for Dummies.” Those subjects are limited, however. His current project is universal because everyone is a consumer who has endured shoddy or hostile service.
“Maybe we can teach people to do the right thing and be noisy about it,” said Barkoff, a frequent traveler and somewhat of a serial letter-writing complainer. “You’re doing a disservice to the business if you don’t complain.”
Constructive complaining is a lost art, he said. Customers often get nasty or, more often, shrug and walk away, figuring it’s not worth the effort to right a wrong. Or they think no one cares. Businesses can be tin-eared when hearing complaints. Or they can even aggravate customers more when they respond.
Case in point: Barkoff ordered his wife a dozen roses. They arrived dead. He complained to the florist, who quickly offered Barkoff a cash refund. Barkoff was put off. The man should have immediately sent out a replacement arrangement, he said, even if he had to get it from a competitor. Barkoff says he brings maybe $400 a year in business elsewhere.
“Since I started this project, I’m super critical,” he said. “I think of all sorts of things and see everything.”
He has encountered careless doctors, wake-up calls that don’t come, shirts not laundered on time and a car rental company that threatened him for not returning a car that never left the rental parking lot.
For his project, he is seeking stories outlining the good and bad, but admits the yarns about business falling short are more fun. Here’s one: A customer wants a gallon of soft serve at an ice cream store. They don’t sell gallons, the clerk tells the man. A woman in line points out the store sells quarts. So, she suggests, how about serving the man four?
“I’ll have to talk to my manager,” the employee responds, walking away.
Workers are often getting less training in today’s tight economy, he said. And much of the training they do get just doesn’t sink in.
People inherently know customer service is a fallen art these days, right?
That’s not necessarily so, said Claes Fornell, who heads the American Customer Satisfaction Index at the University of Michigan business school. Customer service “is not in a terrible state of affairs,” he said. Anecdotal stories seem to say most service personnel are listless or incompetent.
But the most recent Satisfaction Index survey of a number of businesses, which was released in May, found a slight uptick in overall consumer satisfaction, to 75.2 percent. Fornell said that number — which includes measurements of how respondents see customer service — has languished around that figure for a couple of years because of a stagnant economy. Since 1994, consumers’ satisfaction has improved with service-oriented industries like restaurants, hotels and banks. Retail has remained unchanged, and satisfaction with airlines has plummeted.
The economy has meant that businesses “do more with less. But it’s harder to do in the service industry.”
Charlie Webb, a California businessman who is finishing a book on the subject called “No Food or Drinks,” said customer service has declined, and people almost expect it to be bad. He said if employees simply perform their job, customers are impressed.
“Today, good is the new great and bad is acceptable,” said Webb. “If there wasn’t a break-down [in service], they’ll rate it high.”
Webb said both customers and service people “are more truculent now; they are more hostile. Customer service is a glaring by-product of that change in society.”
Barkoff wants to categorize customer complaints he is receiving and then give consumers a road-map on how they show hold businesses’ feet to the fire to make things right.
“I’m trying to come up with common sense solutions,” he said. “Companies will spend thousands of dollars on motivational speakers but don’t do little things, like listening to people or simply responding to complaints.”
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