'But Wait, You Promised ...'

The company has access to every conceivable technological helper: the Net, automated phone services, and the most-sophisticated call centers. And yet, my own experience dealing with Sprint PCS has been consistently aggravating. In eight years of having BellSouth provide our home phone service, I've only had occasion to talk to them three or four times. I've talked to Sprint PCS more than that since Halloween -- always with unhappy results.

Sprint PCS knows the right thing to do. It just can't do it. Faerie Kizzire, 51, senior vice president for Sprint PCS, is in charge of customer service for the company. She's a veteran: She spent nine years at Sprint managing customer service for the long-distance business, then managed customer service for a health-insurance company, and was wooed back to Sprint to create customer care for wireless.

I tell her the story of a call I have just listened to with Chad: Marlene in Ohio has had to call three times just to get a credit for charges that shouldn't have been on her bill in the first place. Before Chad, two customer-care advocates dealt with Marlene by simply telling her that she was wrong. As Chad discovers, Marlene was in fact improperly charged. So why did that happen? Why did two customer-service reps argue with Marlene, rather than credit her? Why does Marlene know more about her calling plan than customer care does?

Kizzire is disappointed. "The complexity of the product and the variations in the product can make that kind of problem very difficult," she says. "We do see some of our people falling on the side of 'I'm right' versus 'I'm going to make it right.' "

Sprint PCS looks as if it's doing all of the right things. The company's training program for reps is 6 to 10 weeks long. Across the call center are exhortations to good service: "Did you dazzle your customers today?" Says Kizzire: "It is true that people who have a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. We always say, Don't try to dazzle the customer with what you know. These days, many customers have years of experience."

And therein lies a clue to what's really happening to customer service -- and why. The secret about customer service in the new economy isn't that it's bad -- everyone knows it's bad. The secret is that it's harder to deliver good customer service than ever before. Why? Technology, especially in its early days, is always hard. No surprise there. Why would we expect companies that can't figure out how to run a phone center -- talking to real people about problems in their own business -- to be really good at using advanced technology to automate the process of taking care of us?

And customers are more demanding. We want good service, quickly. We don't wait at gas pumps, we're antsy in ATM lines, and we pay to FedEx things to avoid standing in line at the post office. Companies have created, nursed, and benefited from this impatience. We are victims of it in our own lives. They are victims of it too. It makes providing customer service brutally unforgiving.

Technology has, in fact, made some things quicker and easier, and it has allowed us to take care of ourselves. I can plunge through the details of my online bank statement more thoroughly in 50 seconds than any automated voice-mail system could permit in 50 minutes, or than even the most patient phone operator would tolerate. This means that when we talk to someone in person, either things are really screwed up, or we are really angry and want to share that anger with a person. Or both. Technology has made the actual person-to-person customer service of big companies much more complicated and demanding.

Despite all of the consultants, gurus, and outsource providers, customer service is hard to deliver in a mass economy. I wasn't on the phones at Sprint PCS for more than a couple of hours, and I can see that the real problem isn't customer service or even culture. No, the real problem is more fundamental: Sprint PCS offers a simple service that is really very complicated. Best tip-off? It takes someone 15 minutes to sell me a phone and a calling plan in a Sprint PCS store. It takes Faerie Kizzire 6 weeks -- 240 hours -- to teach a phone rep to handle any problems that I might have with that phone.