Alyson_Ch8_I
I really like when you go into a fancy clothes shop and are bombarded, perhaps to the point of annoyance at the amount of attention and "service" you receive. Then, you go into a wal-mart and are hard-pressed to even find someone to help you, or care enough to help you. Maybe the people in the fancy shop are taught, or their job relies upon them to be that way. Maybe Wal-mart employees just aren't paid enough to care. In both situations, we encounter service design.
Service design is so important to me and maybe it's just me, but a lot of large corporations don't seem to bother much with it anymore. I know I already mentioned wal-mart, but what about all these service phone hot lines being outsourced to india, etc.? When I worked at Sally May, many many many people would complain to me about how they had just talked to someone they could not understand at all and were very frustrated. While I don't necessarily agree with the whole outsourcing issue, the main issue is the accents. I'm sure that there is some accent training done, but obviously it is not enough for these American customers to understand the people trying to help them. I believe this is some poor, poor service design and was not well thought out. How can you provide a service if the customer and employee cannot communicate?
Labels: Alyson_Sanders
posted by Alyson @ 2:49 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
I agree with your walmart statement. It drives me crazy that the store that has everything still cannot make the customer happy. Smaller "mom and pops" shops seem to be able to make the customer a lot happier because they have to strive to keep their business successful. I feel the more successful someone or something is the less they care about the people who brought them their.
This is one of the many reasons why nobody should ever shop at Walmart.
It seems to me that with outsourcing, the designer was most likely worried more about money (the bottom line) than usability.
I think the walmart thing is very true of MANY places. People just don't seem to care.
As far as outsourcing, It is pretty rediculous to me that companies would do that in the first place. As you said, so many people you talk to in customer service have accents that are too hard to understand, and most of the time, it's not the accent that's the problem, it's that they do not know what they are talking about anyway. Aside from accents, training is a huge issue because places like that have a big turnover rate with new people getting hired all the time, and others quiting all the time. Because nobody stays that long, they generally have no idea what's going on. I know many people that will just hang up on a customer service person several times till they get to talk to someone who can actually help them. Unfortunately, this can take hours. It's CRAZY!
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