Everyone of a certain age remembers Lily Tomlin as Ernestine. The “phone company ” (AT&T) was a monolithic entity and Ernestine, as a representative of that entity could be as rude as she wanted to be. There was a veneer of courtesy, with hostility and arrogance just below the surface.

Fast forward a lot of years. “The phone company ” has been broken up by judicial decree into parts and gradually rebuilt itself back into a few mega-companies. Competition is fierce, and while the “Baby Bells ” (local carriers) still own the copper and the central offices, other companies are allowed to ride on those twisted pairs. And of course, you can get phone service through your cable provider as well or just carrier neutral Voice Over IP (VOIP).

So, with all this technology and all this competition, why isn’t customer service better? It seems like the grumpy Ernestine has been replaced by cheerful incompetents: endlessly cheerful, but hopelessly incompetent CSRs set your teeth on edge. I don’t know about you, but I never hear anyone raving about their phone service provider. Mostly, one hopes to ignore them and just use the service. And pray that nothing goes wrong.

Last week I had the unfortunate task of trying to cancel a mobile phone hot spot which had been bundled onto my landline bill. I no longer have a need for it. Between the ubiquity of public and private wifi and the fact that it no longer costs extra to use my iPhone as a hotspot, the hotspot as a stand-alone device has become an anachronism for me.

I started my quest on Thursday. I was transferred to 5 different people at various locations around the world. Each told me that he/she would put me through to the right party. I could almost feel Ernestine putting the plugs in her old-fashioned phone system…in the wrong holes. Each person quite courteously told me I had reached the wrong location and he or she would transfer me to the right one. After the fifth attempt, I gave up. Sometimes it feels like life is too short to sort through an awful phone system, even if that phone system belongs to….the phone company. Seriously…think about it. The phone company has an awful phone system. And in this case, I am talking about AT&T. If you owned a phone company, wouldn’t you want to have the best phone system in the world?

Anyway, I decided to give it another go Friday morning. Somehow, I was in luck, and by the third transfer, I seemed to have found someone who could actually do the cancelation. It took about 15 minutes, and the young fellow complimented me on my “lovely last name ” while he waited for something….I did wonder why I had to wait while he did it, but rules is rules, I guess.

Finally he said that the deed was done. And then….wait for it…he started trying to sell me new bundled services. I laughed and said “You’re kidding, right? ” and hung up.

Now, none of these CSRs were robots, as far as I could tell. AI was not entering into the picture (I can only imagine how that would have played out). But the company itself was so siloed that the land line people couldn’t cancel it, the mobile people couldn’t do it, even the “cancelation department ” (that’s a new one on me, by the way) couldn’t do it. I was sort of speechless.

So here’s the retail-relevant question. Are YOUR organizations so siloed that dissatisfied customers have to be transferred multiple times to get problems resolved? Even “customer service king ” Amazon makes it sort of hard to find an actual customer service phone number on their web site. I mostly find the number by googling it when I need it. It’s true!

I think I’ve mentioned before that my first few newsletter pieces when RSR was formed ten years ago revolved around a lack of customer service. With all the hot and heavy competition in the marketplace, one would think service levels would improve. Not at the phone company. Not at airlines. How about in your retail stores? Or in your call centers? LL Bean has become legend for its excellent phone service. Can you say the same? Are you irritating your customers for the sake of saving a few bucks?

As usual it’s imperative to ask yourself three questions: 1) Are you being pennywise and pound foolish? 2) Have you empowered your employees to do the right thing, and 3) How would you feel if you were on the other end of one of these customer service experiences?

I have to tell you, Amazon is a symptom of an industry-wide problem. It’s not a cause. It’s just filling a vacuum. We really can do better as an industry. Really.