Service America in the New Economy

Service America was Dow-Jones Irwin's best selling book in history. Published in 1985, it has now sold more than two million copies worldwide in hardcover and paperback (Warner acquired the paperback rights, but their contract can be terminated within six months). As the definitive book on customer service--and the first major title in the field--it helped to define the category, spurring on dozens of imitators and creating an entirely new customer-service publishing category. Their seminal book became the blueprint that companies used to reform their service management strategies. In the original, Karl Albrecht and Ron Zemke predicted that delivering customer service value would become more and more important in the years ahead. Although no one could have predicted the new digital world, Karl Albrecht makes a powerful argument for why customer service is even more important in the new economy. He contends that customer service has suffered a major setback in the new e-commerce marketplace: "Web-based businesses, so far, at least, have probably set back the state of the art in delivering customer value by at least ten years.
Even the best of them have simply transformed their businesses into virtual vending machines. The mindless use of digital technology to depopulate the customer interface will turn out to be one of the biggest mistakes many companies will ever make." As examples, Albrecht points to many industries and companies in which it seems virtually impossible to get a human being on the phone (e.g. phone company, airlines etc). Customers are becoming tired of inferior levels of service (e.g. United Airlines customers), and Albrecht predicts that the problem will only get worse as e-commerce becomes more commonplace.