EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF CUSTOMER SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEMS

Abstract

A recent cover story in Time Magazine dealing with the subject of service in America made the following comments: Personal service has become a maddeningly rare commodity in the American marketplace. Flight attendants, salesclerks and bank tellers all seem to have become too scarce and too busy to give consumers much attention. Many other service workers are underpaid, untrained and unmotivated for their jobs, to the chagrin of customers who look to them for help... Economic upheaval is to blame. First came the great inflation of the 1970’s, which forced businesses to slash service to keep prices from skyrocketing. Then came deregulation, which fostered more price wars and further cutbacks. Meanwhile, service workers became increasingly difficult to hire because of labor shortages in many areas. At the same time, managers found that they could cut costs by replacing human workers with computers and self‐service schemes. It all makes perfect bookkeeping sense for businesses, but the trend has left consumers without enough human faces to turn to for guidance in spending their billions of dollars on services.

Citation

Garfein, R.T. (1987), "EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF CUSTOMER SERVICE DELIVERY SYSTEMS", Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 1 No. 2, pp. 19-25. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb024704