'But Wait, You Promised ...'



The new economy was built on a promise: The customer would finally be in
charge. Why do so many customers feel betrayed? by Charles Fishman from FC
issue 45, page 110

I am in the belly of the beast. I have risen early, traveled far, and
overcome lines, rudeness, and indifference. Now, heedless of my chances of
coming back without serious psychological or physical injury, I am
journeying into a swamp that has become a source of boundless irritation,
frustration, confusion -- even fury -- for tens of millions of Americans. I
open the door and step into a customer-service call center. And not just
any call center either -- one that is exclusively devoted to handling
problems with cell-phones. It's cool inside and fairly well lit, for a swamp.

I am carrying the very tool itself: a Sprint PCS cell-phone. I love my
Sprint PCS cell-phone. But God help me when I have to call Sprint PCS. I
have sometimes called this very building in Fort Worth, Texas. Often, I'm
not even sure that the customer-care advocate I finally speak with after
I've been waiting on hold for 17 minutes even knows what a cell-phone is.

I have come here at the beginning of a long journey -- really, a quest of
the sort that was common in antiquity -- during which I will cross the
continent several times and seek out both oracles and common folk. I am
determined to unravel a central mystery of life in modern America: Why is
customer service so terrible? At the Sprint PCS call center, I am soon
teamed up with customer-care advocate Chad Ehrlich, a gracious 29-year-old
with years of experience delivering service by phone. Chad takes a call
from a businessman in Lubbock, Texas. The man is upset about his bill: It
was running $60 to $100 a month. Suddenly, it has shot up to $1,600. "I'm
not going to pay it!" the man declares.

Chad is reserved. "Let me take a look at that bill," he says. Chad whirls
through screens of information. "Hold on a moment for me, sir, I'm going to
get a representative from the fraud department on the line."

Chad puts Lubbock on hold and dials Sprint PCS's fraud department, where he
reaches a familiar recorded message and is put on hold. Lubbock is on hold
for customer-service rep Chad, and customer-service rep Chad is on hold for
more customer service.

A female fraud rep takes Chad's call. She can see from Lubbock's history
that he's complained about this problem before. The conversation between
Chad and his colleague in fraud is frisky.

Fraud: "He thought he was cloned, but he wasn't."

Chad: "His bills did go from almost nothing to sky-high ..."

Fraud: "We can send him to a cloning specialist and make it 'official' if
you want ... " Chad: "He's denying that he made or received the calls."

The impatient woman from fraud dials the Sprint PCS cloning customer-care
department and ... is put on hold.

Do you ever wonder what's going on while you're waiting on hold for
customer service? Really, you couldn't even imagine.

Chad, Lubbock's customer-care advocate, is talking to a woman who is Chad's
customer-care advocate. She has called her customer-care advocate, who is
busy on another call. So now we have two customer-care advocates on hold
waiting for a third customer-care advocate. Meanwhile, a fuming customer
from Lubbock ( who may or may not be trying to rip Sprint off for $1,600 )
waits. On hold.

That, right there, is customer service in the new economy. It has become a
slow, dissatisfying tangle of telephones, computers, Web sites, email, and
people that wastes time at a prodigious rate, produces far more aggravation
than service, and, most often, leaves you feeling impotent. What's even
worse is that this situation is a kind of betrayal. It wasn't supposed to
be this way. One of the promises of the new economy was that the customer
would finally be in charge. We weren't supposed to need to call customer
care -- but if we did, then someone would take our call quickly. ( Why not?
No one else would be calling. ) A customer-service rep would understand our
problem practically before we mentioned it, and all would be made right.
Everyone believes in delighting the customer.

Don't you spend most of your day delighted? Here's a puzzler. Why do we
hear this sentence so often: "We are experiencing higher-than-usual call
volumes... . " If you're experiencing higher-than-usual call volumes, then
why aren't you experiencing higher-than-usual staffing volumes? How hard is
that? What the new economy has done to customer service is exactly the
opposite of what everyone predicted would happen. And as chaotic a time as
it has been to be a customer, it has been a truly weird time to be
delivering customer service. Consider just one example: Five years ago,
discount broker Charles Schwab had 1,450 customer-service reps in call
centers, and 85% of those reps' time was spent providing real-time quotes
and basic company information, and executing trades. Those 1,450 people,
sensing the Internet roaring down on them, were worried about their jobs.
Rightfully so. At the end of this past year, Charles Schwab's customers did
81% of all of those activities without
human assistance. So you would imagine that Schwab could have trimmed its
costly battalion of customer-service reps to 1,000, even to 500.

In fact, the number of Schwab reps has tripled to 4,800. But they're not
doing what they used to do. Customers have demanded new vistas of service.
No one was more surprised than Schwab.

In short, the new economy was supposed to make service better, quicker, and
more effective for customers -- and easier and cheaper for companies. None
of that has come to pass. What happened? I went on a journey to find out.

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.

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.

Some Good News: What's the 411?

My favorite example of new-economy meltdown is directory assistance.

Directory assistance should be the perfect new-economy product: It's just
information -- and simple information at that. There is an existing way to
bill customers, and, given the swift accumulation of databases, directory
assistance should be getting better and better all the time.

"It's gotten so much worse," says customer-service expert Patricia Seybold.
"Now you get the wrong number all the time."

I've kept track during the past two months. Over several dozen calls,
directory assistance delivered the wrong number about half of the time. Of
course, you get charged for the wrong numbers, just as you do for the right
numbers. If it's a long-distance number and it's wrong, you pay for that
phone call too. As if that weren't enough, here's a moment of customer
delight: Call directory assistance and try to get a credit for a wrong number.

"I'm sorry, sir," says the abrupt operator. "We don't give credits."

"I beg your pardon?" "We don't give credits, sir. You have to call your
local phone company. When your phone bill comes."

"At the end of the month?" "Correct, sir. Is there a number you need?" So
now I've paid once for the wrong number and paid again to be told that I
have to call some other company, some other time, to get my $2 back.

Yet one company gives delightful directory assistance -- polite, accurate,
helpful. It is none other than ... Sprint PCS. The contrast between
cellular directory and land-line directory is as dramatic as the contrast
between Sprint PCS directory and Sprint PCS customer care. Ask Sprint PCS
for a restaurant's number, and they offer to make a reservation. Ask for
the number of a movie theater, and they offer to read you not just the
number but also the movies that are playing at that theater, when they are
playing, and who is starring in each movie.

Seybold was able to guess exactly what was going on immediately.

"It's outsourced," she said.

And so it is. Metro One Telecommunications, a small company based in
Beaverton, Oregon, handles directory assistance for Sprint PCS -- and also
for Nextel and many regional cellular companies. The quality of Metro One's
service is no accident. As Seybold predicted, that is exactly what it is
selling to cellular companies: good directory assistance.

The economics are great for everyone: Even at what feels like an unhurried
pace, Metro One's operators take 50 calls an hour ( including breaks, slow
periods, and training ), which brings in $50 an hour. Half of that goes to
Metro One, half is gravy to Sprint PCS. Of the $25 an hour that Metro One
gets, operators start at some centers at $9 an hour in straight salary --
before incentive pay or benefits. Me, as a customer? I get the right
number, for about what BellSouth's wrong numbers cost me.

Metro One has 29 deliberately small call centers: 200 operators or fewer,
with 100 or fewer working at any one time. The call center in Charlotte,
North Carolina is lean -- spartan compared to Sprint PCS's Fort Worth
center. But you can understand the entire place in a single glance.
Directory assistance, of course, is child's play compared to helping people
with their cell-phones. But remember: Standard directory assistance is abysmal.

Heather McCuen, 23, started at Metro One in March 1999, and after nine
months, she makes $12 an hour. Calls cascade in on her like a waterfall.
"Leith Mercedes."

"Larry's Plant Farm."

"Start-to-Finish Tattoo Shop."

"Just What the Doctor Ordered Restaurant."

"I'm amazed at what people name their businesses," Heather says.

In 11 minutes, she takes 17 calls -- 38.8 seconds a call. Heather's style
is efficient but deliberate. She reads the number slowly to avoid having to
repeat it.

What is striking is how little it takes to make people happy, how little it
takes to get it right, and how long 40 seconds really is.

But what is also striking is how hard it would be to automate this process.
To do it right doesn't require much, but it does require a spark of human
intelligence on both ends of the transaction.

Even in these brief encounters, the full range of human character is on
display. "I'm looking for Shannon Pickering," says a man over a
characteristically crackly connection. The Charlotte center serves mainly
North Carolina and South Carolina, so the operators are familiar with local
geography, but Heather and her colleagues can provide numbers nationwide.
Heather patiently searches a couple of the towns that the man mentions,
without luck.

"I found someone's day planner in the middle of the road," the man says.
"I'm just trying to return it to her."

Heather ups her intensity a notch. She broadens her search to all of North
Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. She tries a variety of spellings
for the names. Heather tells the man what she is trying. She is regretful.
The man is regretful. The call spills past two minutes.

No luck.

Metro One's databases are updated with fresh numbers in real time, all the
time. Operators can send along complaints about wrong numbers. All kinds of
searches are available. I saw one operator find a particularly elusive
residential number by reading through a list of every person who lived on a
street.

The Baby Bells shoot for directory calls lasting 17 to 20 seconds, total,
compared to Metro One's 33-second standard. That, of course, is the
difference. And as trivial as it may sound -- what's 15 seconds? --
companies know how to do the multiplication. At least, they know how to do
it when it's their 15 seconds.

Metro One's Charlotte center handles roughly 275,000 calls a week.

The math is easy. If each call lasts 33 seconds, as it does at Metro One,
then 275,000 calls require 2,520 hours of operator time. If each call lasts
20 seconds, as it does at BellSouth, then 275,000 calls require only 1,528
hours of operator time.

It takes 50% more people to do it the Metro One way. To do it right.



Secrets of the Amazon: Customer Service as R&D

For all of its struggles -- with its balance sheet, its stock, the union
drive, and layoffs -- amazon.com has done one thing brilliantly: customer
service. I placed my first order with amazon in 1997 and have been a steady
customer since. In four years of making purchases for myself and for
others, I've found what I needed, ordered it, received a flurry of emails
about my orders, and then gotten either thank-you notes or what I ordered.
I've never had to contact amazon about any matter. I have had, in essence,
no customer service from amazon. Put another way, I have had such perfect
customer service, the service itself has been transparent.

That is exactly what amazon wants. The goal is perfect customer service
through no customer service.

In a very short time, amazon has set a new standard for customer service,
and I went to Seattle to see how. What I discovered is a place that regards
customer service as an R&D lab -- a way not to help customers, but to help
the company.

"We want to make it easier and easier for our customers to do business with
us," says Bill Price, 50, vice president of global customer service for
amazon. "We want to have everything go so right, you never have to contact
us. To do that, we have to stay tuned up. We have to keep asking, What are
the problems?" Of course, every customer-service VP in america, every
customer- service VP in history, would agree with those sentiments. Two
things make all the difference at amazon: the view the company takes of
customer service and customers, and the way the company is organized to
drive home that view.

Amazon doesn't consider customer service to be the complaint department, or
even the quality-control and customer-satisfaction department. amazon
considers Bill Price's outfit to be a research lab for discovering how to
adjust and improve customer service. And amazon considers customer service
to be its core business. The company really offers nothing but customer
service.

So every single encounter with a customer -- by phone, by email, even by
clicking on Web pages -- is considered to be the source of potentially
vital information about the course of the entire company.

How does that work? Well, to start with, the company tracks the reason for
every customer contact. It keeps a list of the top-ten reasons why
customers contact the company -- monitoring the list daily, weekly, monthly
-- and it is constantly working on ways to eliminate those reasons. For
years, the number-one question that people asked amazon was, Where's my
stuff? Now, on every page, starting with the welcome page, there's a box
labeled, "Where's my stuff?" Amazon's operations are so interwoven with
customer-driven changes that employees are briefly baffled when you ask for
examples.

"Two years ago," says Price, "one common problem was, 'I want to buy five
books, and ship them to my five brothers, each at a separate address.' Our
system was originally set up so that one order had to go to one address,
forcing the customer, in a case like that, to place five separate orders.
Now we have a 'ship-to-multiple-addresses' function. And you don't need to
get in touch with us to figure it out."

Shortly after its consumer-electronics store debuted, amazon was deluged
with requests for a simple chart that would compare the features and prices
of similar products, such as mp3 players and digital cameras. As a result,
amazon has developed a product-by-product "comparison engine" that does
exactly that.

Just last year, a customer sent an email pointing out something that had
bugged him for years: On the main ordering page, customers are instructed
to enter their email address and their amazon password.

Next come two options: "Forgot your password? Click here" and "Sign in
using our secure server."

Originally, the options were in that order. If someone simply tabbed from
option to option, he would click, "Forgot your password?" -- even when what
he wanted to do was sign in. Because of that single, irritated email, the
ordering page was changed.

Again, though, the head of customer service at any big company could tick
off customer suggestions that have drifted up and changed products and
operations.

But at amazon, the notion of customer service as R&D isn't a slogan, it's a
structure -- an unavoidable force to be reckoned with.

Price's division includes a group that does nothing but analyze and
anticipate problems and cook up solutions. Indeed, representatives from
customer-service project management sit on all launch teams as "the voice
of the customer."

The ethic cuts deeper than it would first appear. "You can have a great
overall culture," says Price, "with real empathy for the customer and
passion for fixing the problems. You can have individual reps who say,
'This customer is really upset, and I have to deal with it.' I think we do
that.

"What's missing almost everywhere else is, even if you have the empathy and
the passion and you address the customer's problem, you haven't really
given good customer service in total. You haven't done that until you have
eliminated the problem that caused her to call in the first place."

Exactly.

It is, frankly, easy to be skeptical of all of this. For such a strategy to
work, the entire company has to bend to it. One incident ( of many that I
encountered ) shows how deeply ingrained the attitude is.

The problem materialized during the 1999 Christmas season, the first
Christmas that amazon sold toys. Almost as soon as the selling season
began, the company received complaints that were notable more for the level
of outrage than for the actual number of problems.

Some toys were big enough to be shipped in their original packing boxes.
"They were arriving on people's doorsteps, and the people called and said,
'Hey, we weren't expecting this to look like a Big Wheel. My kid came home
from school and found his present! Now I gotta buy another one!' " says
Janet Savage, 31, who was a customer-service manager that Christmas. This
quickly became known as the Big Wheel problem, and it was Savage's job to
resolve it.

It was an interesting moment. One possible response -- a perfectly
reasonable response -- would be to start warning customers about items
shipped in original cartons. After all, if you buy something at Toys 'R'
Us, you don't complain that it comes wrapped as what it is.

That response was never considered at amazon. Savage simply started looking
for durable, inexpensive wrapping material that would be available
immediately and in large quantities. "Our customers were not happy," says
Savage. "It was not acceptable to tell parents, Oh well, too bad."

She found rolls of plastic material like the type used in big garbage bags,
and amazon started overwrapping every large toy and a selection of
electronics items that were likely to be Christmas gifts. How urgent was
it? "I bugged people about it on an hourly basis until we got it resolved,"
says Savage. "You're either Santa Claus or you're not."

Great Service: Back to the Future

I have a running argument with customer-service experts that may be mostly
an argument on my side. It is neatly summed up by One to One guru Don
Peppers. He offers two key points about service. First, "Service is bad
because it's hard to do."

Second, "The secret to good service, really, is to treat your customer like
you'd like to be treated yourself."

Somewhere between point one and point two, I missed the hard part.

The hard part is not the service. The hard part is everything but the
service. The hard part is how companies think about what they are doing and
how they behave as a result. Why is the service of airlines so bad? Simple:
Airlines don't think of themselves as service organizations. Airlines think
of themselves as factories that manufacture revenue-seat miles. Airlines
have been tuned in to the efficiency of their manufacturing operations, not
to the quality of the journey that they provide.

When you spend weeks talking to people about customer service, when you
visit people who do it as their livelihood, it is easy to become consumed
with the challenges, the technology, and the measurements that obsess the
world of customer service.

How much cheaper is it to deliver balances by automated phone menu than
through a service rep? How much cheaper is it to deliver balances on the
Web than over the telephone? What do people want to talk to a person about?
What do they want to do themselves? How do you create customer
satisfaction, customer delight, and customer ecstasy? Most of those
questions miss the larger point.

Dan Leemon, 47, chief strategy officer for Charles Schwab, understands this
dilemma clearly. Charles Schwab is a brokerage firm, of course. It keeps
money for people, has custody of stock certificates, and functions as a
bank in many ways. But like Sprint PCs or directory assistance, Schwab is
really a pure customer-service organization. Its specialty is
financial-services customer service -- but it's service all the same.
Everything else is record keeping.

"A lot of companies fall into the trap," says Leemon, "of believing that
some new customer-service technology will take cost and management burden
away and will eliminate the need to have very talented people on the phones
and in their retail outlets.

"That has actually never been true," he says. Indeed, the complex demands
of customers have increased the length of the typical call to Schwab by 75%
during the past five years.

One old-economy sector that is justifiably famous for service is the cruise
industry. The high-end cruise lines achieve this by offering training,
incentives, and quality facilities. One thing that they do particularly
well is suck up customer feedback.

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines ( RCCL ), for instance, has 22 ships.

When a ship docks at home port at 7 AM, before it clears customs, someone
from RCCL has boarded to retrieve the customer-comment cards distributed to
every cabin. The ratings are tabulated, the written comments are
transcribed, and the results are returned to the ship's managers before the
ship sails again at 5 PM.

So before the next cruise begins, RCCL's captains, dining-room managers,
housekeepers, and entertainers know how the previous cruise went -- from
praise to serious problems. Imagine what flying the big airlines would be
like if you got a comment card at the end of each flight -- and the company
acted on what it learned.

But here's the really interesting piece of the RCCL story. With computers,
it's easy enough to tabulate comment-card results now in a single workday.
But in 1971, when RCCL had just one ship and no computers, the process was
the same. Cards were tabulated by hand the day the ship came in, and the
comments were typed ( four carbons ) and delivered back to the ship before
it sailed again in the afternoon.

Ultimately, what is so striking about the customer-service revolution that
we are digging our way through is how little a century of technological
innovation really changes what matters.

Charles Fishman ( [log in to unmask] ) is a Fast Company senior editor.
he's never satisfied.


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