It is up to us as customers to expose and, when possible, boycott all businesses that give bad service.  Today, the customer's choice is between bad service and worse service.  Companies have learned that they can decrease costs, offer inferior service, and still turn a profit.  We need to teach them otherwise.

Companies that run us through endless phone menus must be shown that we are sick of being treated like rats in a maze.  Phone menus exist because technology has made it more cost-efficient to direct customers by a self-sustaining automated system than by providing customized help.  Menus are justified up to a point, but they have become so complex and ludicrously overused that they are the brunt of countless sick jokes ("Press 1 if you really meant to press 3 when you pressed 4.")  The system leads to ridiculously long and numerous instructions to "please hold," the reason for which is simple – companies hire just enough service representatives to handle the calls.  Some of them actually conduct studies to determine the maximum length of time they can keep a customer on hold without losing the customer altogether.  We need to sabotage a system that makes it easier to reach a friend in Hong Kong than to reach the service department at the local Sears store.

The only way to strike back is to make the menus costly and the hold time costlier.  It's hard to defeat the menu because we usually do want to get through, so hanging up is not an option.  One ploy, however, is to purposely hit the wrong button at least once.  This will misdirect the call, and we can apologize by claiming that the menu confused us.  When a company is subject to hundreds or thousands of such "misdirected" calls, it may be forced to revisit the menu idea; in addition, the misdirected call costs downtime for the rep and hence for the company.  For us, the callers, the loss of time is insignificant because, even if we religiously follow the menu, we are usually directed to the wrong department anyway.

As for the hold time problem, the answer is to go against our better natures.  Most of us would like to be courteous to the phone rep who comes on the line at the end of the menu-and-recorded-messages ordeal.  I hate to say this – no, I don't really – but we have to be rude, or at least very brusque.  Every one of us must be firmly committed to wasting more time (on the company's end of the line) by complaining about the hold time.  We must make companies realize that we know "Your call is very important to us" and "A representative will be with you in just a moment" are flat-out lies.  When they say, "We're sorry, but all our representatives are busy at the moment," we know they aren't sorry – they designed the system that way.  We tend naturally to focus on the time we are losing; we should focus on making them lose time.

The initial impact, of course, will be to make a bad system worse for us.  But ultimately it can result in such severe bottlenecks that it won't work at all, and this may rattle a few cages in the managerial zoo.  Companies that want to remain competitive will be forced to hire more representatives and to streamline their call-in systems for better efficiency.  At the very least, the reps' jobs will become so unbearable that companies won't be able to find enough masochists to do the work – and those who do stay on will demand combat pay.

Another area in which we need to change our approach as customers has to do with promises that businesses make to us.  We must stop expecting these promises to be broken and stop acting as if the only broken promises worth complaining about are those to which the company is legally bound.  As long as we expect service people who are scheduled to call in the morning to show up in the afternoon – and tolerate this practice without making a complaint – they will continue to show up late.

Don't call only when the service is unsatisfactory; call whenever it is not carried out at the time promised, even when it is satisfactory.  Especially if the service is satisfactory, complaint calls serve another purpose:  they load the company's lines with calls about which the company can do nothing except apologize; they represent more downtime.  Our complaint, in such cases, should put the onus on the company and not on the service person (unless it is obvious that this person is a dawdling, lazy oaf).  We should insist that we are convinced that the cause for the delay is that the company is not sufficiently interested in good service to hire enough service people.  And this is usually the truth.  In a recent dealing with DirecTV that involved two service calls promised between 8 a.m. and noon, one service person arrived at 2 p.m. and the other at 3:45 p.m.  Both said that they were overloaded with appointments.  (I can't resist the urge to insert here that the first man botched the job and that the second, who was supposed to correct the mistake, hadn't a clue about how to fix it.  Despite a promise of yet another morning service call, we cancelled an account with DirecTV that was worth nearly $100 a month.)

Most of us rarely tell stories of about being yanked around by a company unless the experience has been a total horror.  "Minor" inconveniences (an hour on the phone to resolve a routine complaint, a service person who is three hours late) are too ordinary to make even good small talk.  More extreme stories of situations in which business practices were well beyond irresponsible but a tad short of illegal usually evoke just enough interest for someone else to tell a similar tale.  Perhaps we get some comfort in knowing that others suffer too.  But we should not.  We should be thoroughly ticked off that nearly all businesses are abusing customers so frequently that customer disservice is not even worth talking about.  We should be talking about it often – and naming the offenders.

There's no point in preaching customer service to American companies.  They all claim to have it, but their hypocrisy is so great that they spend more on advertising that they have good service than they do on delivering it.  (In a wonderfully ironic moment, while I was struggling to get my DirecTV system to work properly, it came on just long enough to show part of a testimonial for DirecTV before the picture was zapped again.)  For all the lip service given to service, the bottom line is everything; so hit 'em where it hurts.

Every rotten service experience deserves to be broadcast, naming names and reciting details.  Some companies have gone under because customers have had it with bad service, although the news reports usually blame competition and other market factors.  For example, an electronics store in our area went belly up when word-of-mouth reports of poor service and bait-and-switch tactics became widespread.  The corporate spin, however, was that the store was done in by the competition.  Even if the spin was half true, what caused the competitor, who had the same products at the same and sometimes higher prices, to survive?  The store that failed was shattered by a tidal wave of very vocal customer dissatisfaction.  The store that survived had better service and was better at delivering on promises.

Unfortunately, the companies that crash in this manner are only the worst of the worse.  Others need to get the message.  While we can't confine our patronage to businesses that are good (there are not enough of them), we can take our business to those that are "less bad."  And we can certainly get out of the rut of accepting bad service and rationalizing that everyone operates that way.  If the checkout lines are long and slow because the store is too tight to have enough personnel to man the checkout stations, we should assess whether we really need what we're buying (or just want it).  If we don't absolutely need it, we can put it on the floor and walk out.  If about twenty people a day did that for a few weeks in a chronically understaffed store, I bet we would see a change.  It's a sacrifice, of course.  But right now we are being forced into sacrifices of time and peace of mind for the benefit of rotten businesses; if we must make sacrifices, let's make those that also punish the businesses.

Changing the present situation will take time – maybe a lot of time.  The degradation of customer service did not occur overnight; it cannot be corrected overnight either.  We are going against a cynical, customer-be-damned business orientation that is deeply entrenched.  These companies exist in heavily fortified bunkers, defending their bottom line and their stock ratings.  They are impervious to pot shots from the few customers who are courageous enough to fight back.  However, if we all work at it, we have the power to attack successfully – from the front (by attacking and complaining about bad service directly), from the rear (by word of mouth about their practices), and from the flanks (by patronizing less bad competition).  My target at the moment is DirecTV (this article is part of the rear guard action).  What's yours?

Rich Turner