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Nobody ever apologizes.

I don’t know why this exemplar of good manners has vanished. Perhaps the self-esteem movement decided it damages one’s sense of self-worth. Or maybe some staff attorney decided it admits guilt and is too risky to utter.

Or maybe nobody ever told customer service representatives the first words they should utter (once customers outlast the automated, “Your call is important to us,” lie to present a complaint) should be, “I’m sorry you’ve had a problem. How can I help you?”

A real-world example, directly relevant to your job: A correspondent called her bank’s interactive voice response (IVR) system to check her balance. Pressing a few dozen buttons revealed that her account balance was precisely zilch. A few more buttons and she heard about a large transaction, not of her doing, which had cleaned out the account.

The next morning, in one of those Burns-and-Allen conversations in which each follow-up question elicits an increasingly peculiar response, she heard:

  • A recent merger caused some account numbers, including hers, to duplicate those of some of the other bank’s customers. Everyone affected was assigned new account numbers (and accounts).
  • No, I can’t tell you your current balance. If I had your date of birth on file I could, but that didn’t survive the conversion so I can’t.”
  • “Your automatic payments? We notified all of the companies. Some will accept the change; others won’t. [How will I know?] “You’ll just have to work through that.”
  • “Your new account number? No, we can’t give that out over the telephone. It should be on your new checks, though.” [What new checks?] “You didn’t order new checks? This was covered in the letter we sent… Oh, I guess that wouldn’t have helped: We only sent them a week before the change, so you wouldn’t have had time to do anything.”
  • “You never received the letter?” [No.] “No, I can’t send you a copy.” [Who can?] “I don’t know.”

And on and on. What she never heard was, “We’re sorry for the inconvenience.”

Why is this more to you than just an amusing anecdote?

Think how much of the above disaster either originated in or could have been ameliorated by IS. New account numbers could have been assigned months before merging the systems, and with a little custom programming, provided through both printed bank statements and a pre-recorded IVR message. Losing the birth date field on a database conversion is an amazing lapse. As far as handling the conversion of automatic bill payments to new account numbers, it doesn’t take much imagination to invent a half-dozen automated procedures that would have made problems rare exceptions.

No, IS doesn’t own the whole episode. But here’s something to ponder:

This conversion might have been good business if only employees had been inconvenienced. Dealing with exceptions manually is sometimes the right decision.

Real, paying customers have, and should have, higher expectations. In an age of e-commerce, your mistakes will, increasingly, drive customers into the arms of your competitors. And in this age of e-commerce, IS will increasingly be held accountable, not just the delivery of working technology, but for final business results.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

There are times when all choices are of the Hobson’s variety. Take the upcoming election: We’ll all get to choose between Al (The Buddhist) Gore and George (The Real Reformer) Bush.

And if you think choosing between these two yutzes is Hobsonesque, IT salaries must be driving you nuts.

A recent Wall Street Journal article described the sad plight of managers who are forced to pay new hires far more than loyal, longstanding employees, thereby running the risk of ticking off said long-standers. The Journal presents this dilemma as a thorny corporate issue. Probably because it interviewed only managers, it did not report the dilemma for what it is: Poetic justice rather than Hobson’s choice. The problem arises because employees believed what they were told.

In the early 1980s, corporate America adopted the market theory of compensation. According to this theory, companies should pay employees what the labor market will bear. Neither seniority nor value is relevant. The price of labor is a commodity, subject to the same laws of supply and demand as cinder blocks and lentils.

At the time, with inflation high, jobs scarce and job hunters abundant, this theory was convenient – it justified salary increases below the rate of inflation. Not only that, but administered fairly it did and does makes sense, since it sets compensation at the balance point where companies have no incentive to replace employees with applicants willing to work for less and employees aren’t tempted to look elsewhere in order to obtain large salary increases.

Alas, with the current labor shortage driving labor rates higher, the market theory has become inconvenient for corporate America.

Corporate leaders gripe that they can’t keep salaries competitive, so they lose valuable talent, pay premium prices to replace it, then experience morale problems and more attrition when formerly loyal employees find out they’re paid a lot less than newcomers. But it isn’t that they can’t keep salaries competitive … they simply won’t. Proof? Fuel costs are also skyrocketing right now, also because demand exceeds supply. Executives aren’t refusing to pay the higher fuel prices because if they did they’d run out of gas.

Want some advice? Schedule a meeting with your CEO and HR director as soon as you can. Explain that within IT at least, the company has three options, and that while you’re willing to accept any one of them, you want to make sure the company has made the optimal choice.

The options: (1) Keep employee salaries competitive with the marketplace to minimize unwanted attrition and maximize morale; (2) keep employee salaries where they are and watch them drift up anyway as employees paid less than market rates leave and are replaced by new ones who are paid at market rates while they spend months becoming effective; (3) keep employee salaries where they are, refuse to pay market rates for new hires in the twin interests of frugality and fairness, and instead pay premium prices for contractors to fill the empty positions for which you can’t attract applicants.

The market does set the price. Your choice is in how you choose to pay it.

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