CONSUMER ISSUES Consultants report rising complaints about companies' customer service

Some experts blame consumers for putting up with substandard treatment.
WASHINGTON POST
When Mary Culnan's 3-year-old Kenmore washing machine broke in February, it took three appointments before a Sears repairman showed up.
Before he even examined the machine, he blamed Culnan for the problem, saying she had not only used the wrong detergent, but also the wrong cycle. The permanent press setting, he said, could have burned out the machine's contacts. "I have no idea what that means," said Culnan, a Boston-area professor.
The repairman finally traced the problem to a defective circuit board, which fixed things -- for a while.
Cell-phone woes
When Scott Rozett bought a family cell-phone plan last June, the salesman assured him he could make and receive calls in San Francisco at no extra charge. But in November, one month after the Idaho resident visited the Bay Area, he received a $160 bill for roaming charges. When he called AT & amp;T Wireless, a customer service representative told him the company was not responsible for promises made by a salesman.
When an error in Manon Matchett's Sprint PCS bill caused her service to be disconnected in December, she spent three days trying to get it restored. She called at least twice a day, she says, and each time was transferred from one department to another as she tried to get credit for payments that had never been posted to her account.
She talked to at least nine people, but "no one could make a definitive decision," said Matchett, an office manager in the District of Columbia. Nor could she reach a manager, even in the middle of the day. "I was told no managers were available. It was pure hell," Matchett said.
Gauging quality
As Culnan, Rozett and Matchett have discovered, customer service has deteriorated into a new kind of purgatory, one in which companies pass the buck, frequently from one corporate division to another. Or customer service representatives blame other companies. Or, worse, they fault their customers.
"Customer service is getting worse; it's not getting better," said John Tschohl, a Minneapolis customer service consultant. Certain industries are more unsatisfactory than others, he added, singling out cell-phone companies as bottom-of-the-barrel bad. But, he added, customer service has gone south in all kinds of industries.
There is no historical measurement to show if and how customer service may have declined over the past few years, but consultants and academics say there is abundant anecdotal evidence.
A current snapshot of consumer satisfaction by the University of Michigan Business School reveals a large group of unhappy campers. In its most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index, the average score for complaint handling is 57 (out of 100) for the 40 industries tracked by the index.
"No one does a particularly good job in handling complaints," said David VanAmburg, managing director of the index, which measures consumer satisfaction with goods and services.
There is one exception: supermarkets, which had a customer satisfaction score of 76 for how they take care of complaints. The lowest score was recorded by local telephone firms (the index didn't measure wireless phone service).
Even more disturbing, VanAmburg said, is that a closer look at 17 industries with enough data to measure satisfaction in great detail showed 14 -- or 82 percent -- field complaints in such a way that they are driving customers away.
Reasons for decline
Why has customer service gone downhill?
Claes Fornell, director of the University of Michigan's National Quality Research Center, which computes the customer satisfaction index, blames the "productivity trap." With companies looking to do more with less labor, or lower labor costs, customer service is one area that suffers. Companies trim employees and training. Or they hire outside companies, often with foreign call centers, to handle consumer complaints.
At some companies, the economy has required sharp cutbacks in all departments. At Levi Strauss & amp; Co., which lost $349 million in 2003, all departments have been asked to trim budgets.
For the customer service department, which has had a Colorado telemarketing company answer its calls over the past six years, that has meant cutting in half its call center hours, and answering calls less quickly; instead of 7 seconds, it may take 20 seconds before a caller reaches an operator. The company is trying to use the Internet to provide more answers, or offer answers as recorded messages, in hopes of reducing its call volume by 20 percent.
But several consultants say it's not just the companies that are at fault for the decline in customer service. These experts blame consumers.
"We've allowed it because we've become tolerant of mediocrity," said Ron Rosenberg, head of Quality Talk, a North Carolina training and consulting company that sponsors Drive-You-Nuts.com, a Web site at which consumers can post complaints and compliments as well as seek advice.
"If you have a car that's supposed to be ready at 2 p.m. and it's not, then you need to do something to make it right," Rosenberg said. Most people don't, he said. "People will accept bad service and inconvenience."