The Expert Podcast

If you're a consumer, as most people are, you have seen the results of the new business model that all companies have and even government agencies—having less customer service. How hard is it to get somebody on the phone anymore? How hard is it to get somebody to call you back? Even for sales, even when you're trying to buy something, it's hard to get somebody on the phone.

Well, here's a perfect example of the extreme nature of that and what you can do about this. What can you do about getting customer service? We'll talk about that, but here's the article from CNBC. Frontier Airlines is canceling telephone customer service. Effectively, they already did this. Most of the airlines now, even if they have customer service or a phone number you can call, nobody answers the phone anyways, right? I'm sure you've seen that whether you've called an airline, a government agency, or companies like Amazon that you want to do business with. Nobody has a person waiting around answering your phone call, right? Companies don’t have people just sitting there wanting to talk to you on the phone. They make you go through some other channel, whether it's email, text message, or live chat. But they always had a phone number—it's just nobody ever answered it. It just went to voicemail. But here is one example where the company's saying directly, "We're getting rid of customer service by phone," and they can reach out by tech, social media, and WhatsApp.

So what does that mean for you, and how can you still get customer service? Well, first, let's take a look at the reason why they're doing this. The one important thing about phone is it's one-to-one interaction, right? If you're on the phone with somebody, that person can only help you. They can't help talk to somebody else, right? You have their undivided attention. And what they're doing is, on chat or email, that person can handle multiple conversations at once. If you're emailing the company, that email provider can talk to maybe 10 people. Live chat can talk to 10 people, right? So if you have an obscure question that the customer might ask, according to the article, a call center agent may take many minutes to research and find the answer. A chatbot can answer that very quickly. So that's the reason why they're doing it.

So how does that affect you, and how can you still get the answer? Well, you have two choices. One is you can use their chatbot or their website, or their YouTube channel, or look at YouTube videos for the answer to your question. If you do want a one-on-one conversation with a person, just recognize that in this day and age, that's going to be something that's going to be a higher business model. Right? In the case of Frontier, they don't have that one-on-one conversation because they are a low-budget airline. Some of the other higher-end airlines, like Delta or American, if you fly first class, you can contact an agent, put in your ticket number, and you can still contact an agent. So, there's the money thing. You could throw money at this problem and still talk to an agent. You might not think it's fair that you have to throw money to talk to somebody, but the way that labor rates are right now, companies just can't afford to have people sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to call them because it just costs too much money. They would have to jack up their prices so much that it wouldn't be worth it.

There are options that you can take advantage of where you can pay to talk to somebody one-on-one. You'll see some options on our screen on a number of different subjects. It may be distasteful to do that—you shouldn’t—you may feel like you don’t have to pay to talk to somebody for customer service, and maybe you're right. But the other advantage of paying for one-on-one conversation is you have their undivided attention. You can ask them a question, meaning that if you watch a YouTube video, you can't ask YouTube a question. You can put a comment, but you may not get an answer, and you're also getting, presumably, an unbiased third-party answer.

If you are, let’s say, you have a legal question, if you hire a lawyer or you want to hire a lawyer before you hire them, they’re going to maybe steer it towards hiring them. If you’re, let’s say, interested in getting insurance, you have an insurance question—well, if you just call in, you're talking to a salesperson, they're going to try to sell you something or have their answers lead more towards a sale. If you're paying for that interaction, you're paying for that consultation, now you don't have that pressure for that person to sell you. In fact, think about the financial services industry. There is a model for financial advisors that’s a commission model and a flat-fee model. The commission model is you get free financial advice from this financial advisor, but they get a percentage of your investments, of whatever fund they put you into, right? So if you have a 401(k), and you have an advisor that gives you free financial advice, but they have two funds they could put you in—one is a fund that pays them a one-percent commission, and one is a fund that pays them a two-percent commission— which one are they going to put you in? The one percent commission might be better for you, but you know what? They make more money from the other one. Now, the fee-based financial advisor, they don’t take any commissions. They just pick the best one for you. You pay them a fee. It might be three or four hundred dollars a month, but now you're paying for their expertise.

And there are fee-based options for you in other areas too. You can pay for a consultation with an attorney, you can pay for consultations in many industries, you can even pay to have somebody give you their undivided attention and answer any questions about fixing your car, about doing work on your house, about computer repairs. There are options for paying a fee now. Whether or not you agree with that or not doesn’t matter at this point. The labor pool is such that in order to have very dedicated, unbiased third-party quality responses, companies have to charge for it because if they don’t, you're going to deal with one of two other kinds of people. You're either going to talk to a salesperson that may not give you factual information because they're trying to sell you something, or you may talk to a low-level phone receptionist that has no clue on the answers to your question. And that’s easy to provide for free because they're already answering the phone, but they're not going to be answering your question. They’re just going to say, “Yeah, I'll pass it along and Joe will call you back.” Joe’s never going to call you back because they have a job to do, whatever they’re doing.

So, you'll see more and more examples of reduced customer service. You probably already have seen it. How long do you wait on hold now? Sometimes you don’t even wait on hold. They tell you, “We don’t answer the phone, send us an email.” Try calling the DMV—one of the largest retailers in the country, Amazon. Look at their website—there’s no phone number. You can’t call Amazon to buy something, right? So that's an example of where customer service is going and how you can deal with it.