The End of Customer Service
By Megan • Mar 18th, 2008 • Category: News for Creatives (archives)Barbara Kiviat reports for Time:
“The people of Memphis had never seen anything like it. 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. The “self-serving store,” as Saunders called it in his patent application, revolutionized retail, much as atms and pump-your-own gas later re-engineered other industries.
Yet it was all simply prelude. Only now are technology and public sentiment aligning to truly shift the responsibility of collecting goods and services to the consumer. Consider the last time you rang up your own purchase at Wal-Mart, checked into a hotel at a kiosk or bought a ticket from a machine in the lobby of a movie theater. Companies love self-service for the money it saves, and with consumers finally playing along, the need to interact with human beings is quickly disappearing.”
Megan is a creative producer at Wise Elephant.
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