Seth Godin shares a story about his struggle to resolve a customer service issue over the phone.  The system at the company he was dealing with seemed designed to have him give up and get him off the phone as quickly as possible without actually solving his problem.  He writes, "Most customer service organizations are architected around a simple idea: interacting with customers is expensive, driving costs down is a good thing, thus getting people to go away is beneficial."

Unfortunately, in this case, the end result was Seth feeling like he'd done something wrong, when in fact he had not.

According to Godin, "Do people who go through process and manage to prove that they are not criminals end up doing more business with us as a result of the way we treated them?" If the answer is no, you're probably doing it wrong.

As we noted last week, many businesses are not following this advice because they feel they can get away with delivering poor service.  However, it could only be a matter of time before those negative experiences pile up and force consumers to do business elsewhere.

Clearly, companies must find a balance between minimizing costs/improving efficiency and delivering quality experiences for customers that cross channels to do business.