Bad self-service

Companies are flocking to self-service systems because they allegedly save money by putting the onus for service on the customer. Newspapers are leading the charge.

The city where I live in Oregon is served by one of Gannett's local dailies. When I first subscribed to the paper eight years ago you called a local phone number, talked to a Helen or a George to handle delivery issues, such as a missed paper or a temporary vacation stop. They knew where you lived, whether the delivery person was sick and if you had special delivery needs. It was excellent service.

Then the paper added an interactive voice response (IVR) system to augment Helen and George. Eventually Helen and George went away and it was just the IVR. (Of course, if you knew how, you could bypass the IVR and get to a human.)

This year Gannett has junked the local IVR for a national 800 line, which takes forever to be answered, if at all. The company's true goal is to push subscribers to the local paper's Web site where an online self-service application "serves" your needs.

It's crap.

First, unlike talking to Helen or George, or even the old IVR system, the Web app requires you to have yet another login and password. Once established, you can see your account status. Interestingly, information such as whether you have created a vacation stop for a given period is not shown. So, if another family member has already put one in, you wouldn't know.

The first time I navigated around the "subscriber services" page, each time I completed a form, it threw me back to my account's home page without letting me know whether my request was completed. On another visit, you could use the tabs to move from the account home page to another page, but once you were on that page, hitting a tab to go elsewhere always returned you to the account home page.

The first two times I used the site to request a temporary vacation stop, the papers continued to arrive on my driveway. An alert neighbor moved the papers out of sight.

Gannett's goofy idea of "customer self-service" is not that unusual. Throw consumers an outsourced 800 number and a Web site, fire the in-house customer-service reps and watch the bottom line grow.

Maybe in the short term that's the truth. But in the long-term that top-line number will continue to shrink, as it is with most newspapers today.

Self-service done wrong -- and to my mind most of it is done wrong -- discourages customers by making them do the service work themselves. It turns your business into an undifferentiated commodity.

CIOs who brag to their bosses that they can save the company money by offloading customer service onto the customers themselves via Web self-service systems are doing their businesses a disservice.

Oh, and my account on the Gannett site does not show that I cancelled my subscription to the newspaper two weeks ago.