Rise of contactless shopping has led to decline in customer service: Daxa Patel

I want to air my frustration about two things here. Contactless service and customer service. So, what do we mean by contactless service? A service where there is just you and a machine. All fine when it works but not when it doesn’t.

So, what is customer service? The Google definition is “a person who buys goods or services from a shop or business”. It is meant to be a direct one-on-one interaction between the customer and the person representing the company, and a good example of customer service includes politeness, promptness and respectful listening.

The result for the company is to build customer loyalty, revenue and satisfaction. For the customer it includes a sense of satisfaction and gratitude whereby I want to return to the provider again. Alternatively, I may willingly want to recommend the service provider because I was so happy by the service.

Admittedly, some contactless service such as getting our banking done on a banking app is efficient or getting our train tickets online, but when there is a problem, what then?

We invariably find ourselves at the mercy of a virtual assistant on an app which also takes forever or waiting for more than an hour on the telephone with a recording along the lines of “your custom is important to us and we will answer the phone as soon as our call handler becomes available to assist”.

Sometimes, we are also told “we are very busy right now if it is not important call us”. As if we have nothing better to do than to waste our time.

Even if you try to wait patiently on the telephone hoping to speak to a human, invariably by the time you do get through to someone there is no guarantee that you will get a solution to the problem you called about.

The frustration, wait and discourtesy than amounts to a sense of anger.

Nowadays we have mainly customer service, but without service. I am not being pedantic or facetious but the older I get the more I feel as consumers we are being shortchanged or taken for fools. For example, we pay for our train journey but in return we get little by way of service. It is a DIY exercise from the minute you get your tickets online to the point you get through the ticketing gates, and board the train.

Sadly, customer service is started to creep into professions where we offer client care. A few years ago, I worked for a law firm that was taken over by a non-legal business and some of ‘their’ people decided our clients were customers. A client to me is not a customer with whom I have a transactional relationship which is over and done within a few minutes. Sometimes the cases I worked on took years to conclude and it was a relationship that required a certain degree of emotional investment from us. This required a huge dollop of tender loving care, and not just my technical legal expertise.

Why is this relevant? We have a growing older population and for some the only person they get to speak in a day could be the staff at their local shop.

Even local supermarkets have self service counters, a sign of modernisation and a need to reduce overheads. But are corporates, companies and businesses contributing to our sense of isolation and mental ill health by offering us a one size fits all ‘service’ in the guise of contactless and customer service?

Surely, we can do better, and we must.

Daxa Manhar Patel is a solicitor, author and executive coach.