Customer Service is Customary Service

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  CRM   Stakeholder Management  

With the advent of the internet and consistent growth of technical expertise in the general population, there has been a great move toward making customer service more of a self-service operation.

On a material level, it often means that we are willing to take charge of certain physical tasks and those that might take considerable time if we did not perform the actions ourselves. Do-it-yourself gas pumps, automated grocery store checkout services, ATMs…all were first designed to provide options that could potentially help us get our work done in a more timely fashion.

Initially, the creation of these services took advantage of forms of technophobia and the lack of self-confidence in segments of the population. Those people that had less exposure to technology (in particular new technologies) found themselves challenged by devices that often had very dissimilar workflows despite having a common purpose (ever notice the variances between cash registers at different store chains?).

For those of us who didn’t mind the learning curve and had perhaps cut their teeth on technology, we were and have been able to take advantage of other peoples’ fears and lack of experience so that we can breeze through lines and minimize waiting.

Such is the story of many new general consumer gadgets, gizmos and so forth. As time progresses however, these usability …

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