Reasons for poor customer service

Jay Goltz recently wrote a piece at the New York Times looking at three main reasons why customer service sometimes fails in today's business world.

1) Health Insurance Costs -- The cost to insure full time workers is expensive, so many stores have part time staffs which leads to not enough training and high turnover.
2) Pricing changes -- The massive sales that occur every other week create a situation where large staffs are needed, yet when stores are not having these sales, much of the staff is sitting around with a lack of things to do.
3) No more merchants -- The children of the merchants have gone on to receive educations and haven't returned to the family businesses. There is also an occurrence of overeducated decision makers who may be looking at things other than customer service when they are pulling numbers together.

Read the full article here.