'But Wait, You Promised ...'

Bold Promises, Bad Results

AT&T is running television commercials for its Worldnet Internet service. One ad features a series of stand-up comics who are making jokes about the bad customer service of their Internet providers ("My online service is like my husband: I stare at it for hours, hoping it will move").

Cisco is running a TV commercial that opens with a regular guy on a cordless phone who hears, "Your call will be answered by the next available operator." Halfway through the commercial, the man has fallen asleep, phone to his ear.

Mockery is a great cultural barometer. Bad customer service is one of the universal -- and unifying -- experiences of being an American in the 21st century. You get it at Wal-Mart. You get it at Lord & Taylor. But is customer service really worse than it used to be? A panel of customer-service experts that I assembled couldn't agree.

Don Peppers, 50, of the Peppers and Rogers Group, proponent of "customer-relationship management" and coauthor of the famous One to One Future: "I don't think that customer service sucks. I think it's bad. But I think it's better than it was five years ago."

Len Schlesinger, 48, an expert in customer service, previously senior associate dean and a professor at Harvard Business School, and now executive vice president of The Limited Inc.: "Let's see, we've gone from 'meeting customer expectations,' to 'exceeding customer expectations,' to 'delighting customers,' to 'customer ecstasy.' I hate to see what comes next."

Patricia Seybold, 51, CEO of an e-business consulting company and author of the optimistic book The Customer Revolution: How to Thrive When Customers Are in Control, which is due out this month: "I agree that customer service hasn't gotten better since the Internet came along. It has gotten worse. But companies are beginning to realize that we're very angry at them. Companies that don't wake up and pay attention to this are going to be out of business."

Well, we can only hope.

Customer service is a notoriously slippery concept -- hard to define, apparently impossible to quantify. But there is one guy who knows for sure what's happening to customer service, because he measures it in 65,000 interviews a year with American customers.

Claes Fornell, 53, is a professor at the University of Michigan Business School and an expert on "the economics of customer satisfaction." Fornell is creator and director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The ACSI measures how content Americans are with the goods and services that they consume -- in the aggregate, and industry by industry, company by company.

Fornell names names! His online data is a carnival for cranky consumers: You can click through and take glee in the lame scores of all of the companies that you love to hate.

First Union, my bank, is down 10.5% in satisfaction ratings since the index started in 1994.

Wal-Mart, my source for diapers, paper towels, and Tide, is down 10% since the index started and down 4% in just the past year alone.

Fornell conceived this herculean undertaking -- scores are measured quarterly -- because he thought that the U.S. economy was being severely mismeasured. "Eighty percent of GDP is service now," he says. "We have to behave as though we live in a service economy."

The ACSI measures the perceived quality of U.S. economic output -- the experience of being a consumer in the United States. In the past five years, the ACSI is down from 73.7 to 72.9. But that number includes everything from Whirlpool appliances to the experience of shopping on Amazon.com.

Here's the amazing thing: Every measured company in the appliance, beer, car, clothing, food, personal-care, shoe, and soft-drink industries is above the national average. Even the cigarette companies have above-average customer-satisfaction ratings.

Not so for airlines, banks, department stores, fast-food outlets, hospitals, hotels, and phone companies.

It's the service that's bad.

"Oh, I think we can say that for sure," says Fornell.

The Hard Truth(s) About Customer Service

I didn't begin my journey through the service jungle at Sprint PCS by accident, or because I think that the company would be a good target for mockery. Sprint PCS is a pure new-economy company. It offers nothing but service -- and it's digital wireless service to boot. The company's only product is moving voices through the air. The first time that you could have made a Sprint PCS call was December 1996. From a standing start, in four years, the company has grown to 28,328 employees (10,000 in customer care), 9.8 million customers, and annual revenues of roughly $6 billion. Sprint PCS signs up 10,000 new customers each day.