Bad Weekend for Best Buy
Published on 25 Apr 2005 at 9:29 am |
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Filed under Service With A Smirk, In Corporations We Trust.
Both Lileks and GeekWithA.45 had run-ins with Best Buy over the weekend. I think they’ve pretty much covered the poor customer service angle. I hope retailers are taking note and we’ll soon see them competing for anonymous/no hassle service.
This over reaching appears to be a general pattern, not just retailers. Why is it that we suddenly think we have the right to subject others to routine requests for personal data? I believe that it’s an attitude shift originating in government practices which has been picked up and imitated by corporations but I also think that the educational system has a lot to answer for. The idea that public schools and even universites act in loco parentis has turned out to be a subtle and destructive doctrine in many ways, but this one not least among them. Parents are indeed entitled to require information about their children which would be inappapropriate to request let alone require from others. The public school is then substituted for parental authority, and just when the adolescent breaks away from the actual parent, a giant collegiate bureaucracy steps in to take over the role.
After 23 years of practice we’re in the habit of mindlessly providing anyone with an authoritative demeanor and a large bureaucracy any information which they might demand. It’s a short step from there to employer drug testing and financial disclosure. I think the same dynamics contribute to the extreme susceptibility to social engineering. "Name please, address, social security. Thanks. Phone number please… Please read off the MAC and IP addresses… thank you. Bank account number and credit card number please… Yes, thank. Oh, and may I have your PIN? Thank you so very much. Now, how may I help you today?"
One more small item, Lileks mentions an entire corporate phone system malfunctioning. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this is one of those organizations where they’ve decided that IT isn’t part of the core business and outsourced it. Or perhaps the CIO was instructed to eliminate that ridiculously expensive new phone switch from the budget. I can’t say for sure how much business is lost through these two means, but I really believe that companies lost far too much through poor infrastructure management and planning and far too little through customer reaction to excessive and intrusive data gathering.
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