#2 The End of Customer Service

When Clarence Saunders opened his first Piggly Wiggly in 1916, a grocery store was a place where you told the clerk behind the counter what you wanted and he fetched it.

In Saunders' store, patrons roamed freely among shelves packed with goods. They took what they wanted and paid on the way out.

Theses two scenarios shows how customer service has evolved.

What is customer service? According to http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/customer%20service : customer service is assistance and other resources that a company provides to the people who buy or use its products or services.

I feel that customer service is a very important. Although technology has advanced over the years, i feel that some things should not be meddle with. First of all, as quoted in the article, 'the need to interact with human beings is quickly disappearing.'. People should be interacting with each other so that we will be able to develop the required social skills such as learning to communicate with another human. Nowadays, with more social websites such as Friendster and Facebook, people are preferring to stay anonymous while making friends. Therefore, we should not deprive people of the opportunity to interact with others by replacing customer service provided by humans with machines. One cannot possibly not interact with other humans and just do everything with machines, if not that person will just literally be another 'Tarzan', not having the skills to interact with humans.

Also, by introducing machines to replace the human customer services, we will be depriving some people of their jobs. For example, waiters will lose their jobs. These will lead to a high unemployment rate. There will also be no courses such as 'hospitality and resort management' in our polytechnics. Our integrated resort, which was party meant to increase job vacancies, will not be able to achieve the aim too. Take for example, if you are a tourist, would you like to visit a place where everything is managed by machines without smiling receptionists at your hotels? I doubt so.

Moreover, humans are flexible in thinking, machines are not. I'm sure everyone has encountered the annoying consecutive messages that ask you to 'press 1 if you are calling to blah blah blah, press 2 if you want to blah blah blah... and so on...'. I think this is a very good example of machines replacing human customer services. If a human were to pick up the call, I am sure he/she would be able to correctly divert you to the respective help/aim you are calling for more quickly. Also, because the pre-recorded messages are fixed, there might be ambiguous meanings, thereby causing the customer more trouble.

However, we must look at things in two ways. Without human customer services, will we be able to save on service charges? If we do, introduction of machine replacements might actually help some not-so-rich people enjoy benefits or goods they once deemed as a luxury.

Not all humans, as we all know, always have integrity. By introducing machines to provide human customer services, we can be ensured of fairness. Bribery will be minimised as machines will not be tempted by bribes, whereas humans might not be able to resist it.

I feel that introduction of machines to replace human customer services benefits only to a certain extent. For example, machines can be used to provide customer services only at inconvenient time, night time. This will save employers the trouble of having to find people to work night-shift. Also, use of machines to a certain extent is good, but relying too much on them might ultimately become a backlash.
Example is the use of add-value machines at our MRT stations. People are able to top-up/check their cards conveniently, while the control station people can attend to customers with more complicated problems.
Therefore, human customer services should only be used for necessary purposes.
Example. Having a clerk to fetch you what you want at a grocery store will result in inefficiently but by placing the goods on the shelves, we enable people to take their time and choose what they want carefully while the cashier might be attending to another customer, i.e. increase efficiently.