When customer service help is unwanted.

On Saturday mornings, before the rest of the house wakes up, I do my weekly bills. Just me, a semi-dark house, ample quiet, the first coffee of the day, no interruptions.

So I was surprised and annoyed when my bank popped a proactive customer service chat into my bill paying session with an offer of help to find the financial services solutions I need.

I don’t know what I found more bothersome – the intrusion of someone popping in on me while in the secure section of my financial management site, or that because I was in online bill pay section of the site, it would have been unlikely that they could have assisted me in my self-service. (Unless they were offering to take the gas bill off my hands for this month.)

My reaction was so viscerally negative that the options to accept the chat or close the window didn’t seem enough – I wanted a button that said, “No, and don’t ever ask again.”

I know that customer service groups engage in proactive chat to route people away from customer service lines and to drive revenue from additional service purchases. And I'm aware that my bank knows what I have in my checking account. But I view this encounter like I would my doctor asking me when I'm going to schedule a prostate exam while we're in the health club steam room – I may need the advice, but the time & place is inappropriate. I’ll ask on my own terms, thank you.

Am I overreacting here?

In a successful service encounter, the provider knows when to play their role and when to step back let the customer play theirs. In this case, I feel the provider entered into a part of the encounter where they weren’t welcome. But is this where service encounters enabled by technology are headed? Is this the new service model, and in two years I’m going to be laughing at myself for stodgily refusing someone’s help?

Related, has self-service become pervasive and have we been so well trained as customers that we now get offended when someone offers help? I can’t help but think that if someone offered to pump my gas, I might have a similar reaction.

Just what am I deciding on?

Self-service can be incredibly enabling for a businesses.

It can increase access to your business beyond the customers and markets you currently serve, improve your number successful outcomes by putting control in the hands of the customer, increase satisfaction through self-gratification, and decrease your service costs.

No wonder most service businesses have been quick to jump on the self-service bandwagon and continue to make self-service investments a priority. Unfortunately, cost impact is too frequently the driving force behind self-service processes and technology, and is widely attributed to much of the vehement dissatisfaction customers have with service in general.

When implementing self-service processes, the critical considerations are in providing customers sufficient knowledge, tools and empowerment to successfully serve themselves. The same service processes you consider when deploying your own labor to serve the customer are the ones that need to be considered when you are using customer labor.

I came across this imperfect execution of self-service process at the local Conoco.

It is clear that they’re giving me choices. I can select between 5 different gasolines with differing octane levels when I fill my car, and Conoco will charge me 5 different prices for them.

Unfortunately, that’s all the support I get. No decision support, no education, no sources for more information. What should I use? What is better? I assume that what costs more is better, but is something that costs less more “right”. Is 88 really better than 87? Is it 1% better, or proportionally more?

Variety is good, but in this case, they’ve left me with a choice without supporting how I would make it.

And so, in a self service situation such as this most customers will do what I did – choose the lowest price and hope for the best. Yet many times I’ve driven away wondering if I should be paying more for a different product in order to take better care of my car.

Most companies would blanche at not providing their front line enough information to make informed decisions, so why would they provide lay customers with less information to make similar decisions?

Better information in customers’ hands yields better self-service decisions, more satisfaction at having performed their role correctly, and in this case, likely more revenue & profit for Conoco.