Customer Service: Empowerment and Entrapment

Citation

Sturdy, A., Grugulis, I. and Willmott, H. (2006), "Customer Service: Empowerment and Entrapment", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 40 No. 9/10, pp. 1143-1145. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090560610681069

This book explores a topic dear to marketers' hearts, namely customer service. As marketers we teach that the customer is the raison d'etre of the marketing orientated organization, placed at the very core of a firm's successful endeavours. The marketing function itself is the customer/company interface, liaising with the other major management functions to best serve the customer. Customer service is, of course, a significant part of this interface at a strategic, functional and tactical level. It is particularly surprising then, and a little disappointing, to note that so few marketers have contributed to this book. In fact, there is only one chapter by marketers (James Fitchett and Pierre McDonagh). The other authors are all from sociology, organizational studies, human resource management and management studies. The positive aspect of this, however, is that the book gives us many insights into how others see customer service, unpicking and interrogating current marketing buzzwords such as CRM, service quality, and indeed, consumer empowerment. The negative aspect of this is that it highlights the lack of critical enquiry in the marketing discipline, and thus it often falls to others to do the critical thinking for us.

The book contains 12 provocative chapters. Instead of the 4 Ps, Andrew Sturdy, in his insightful introductory chapter, puts forward the 4 Cs of customer service: colonisation, control, contradiction and contestation. This introductory chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book: how customer service discourse colonises new domains of work; how it is pervaded with problematic issues of control; and how this control contains many contradictory tensions that may be contested and resisted by consumers and employees alike.

All of the chapters, to a greater or lesser extent, thus challenge and critique the notions of customer service and consumer empowerment. Together they underline the fact that these are not neutral concepts, but ones that raise many issues to do with power relationships. To this end Chapters 2, 3 and 4 explore issues around consumers and services from the employees' perspective. Chapter 2 looks more closely at the notion of “customer sovereignty” and how this discourse has come to dominate the socio‐economic and political environments. The authors, Patrice Rosenthal, Ricardo Peccei and Stephen Hill illustrate how this is not a unified discourse, and how there are important tensions in the different ways that the customer is represented across academic texts. For example, one representation of the customer may be as a device to control employees, as occurs when management spying practices are legitimised through customer service rhetoric. The use of the “Mystery Shopper” in current market research practices springs to mind here, used by firms to check that adequate levels of customer service are being maintained by frontline employees.

The contemporary manifestation of customer service, the ubiquitous call centre is the topic for critical analysis in Chapter 3, or what the author, Edward Wray‐Bliss, refers to as “dark satanic mills”. Here, the focus is on how the strict policing of managerial targets, in terms of call times, may conflict with the ultimate service that the customer receives and this can cause many tensions in the way that employees handle the customers. Similarly, Chapter 4 takes up the theme of emotional labour and how this may be co‐opted for quality customer service. Melissa Tyler and Steve Taylor highlight the gendered discourse that lies at the heart of customer service, a feminine discourse that centres on care, service and responsibility in contrast to a managerially promoted masculine discourse of targets, quantity and commodification.

Chapter 5 continues this exploration of the tensions between management efficiency and service quality. Marek Korczynski points to the conflict between customer orientation and service rationalization as being the key paradox underlying management rhetoric about empowerment, a paradox that leads to the observation in Chapter 6 that “satisfactory customer service seems increasingly hard to find”. Illustrating this with a case study of FedEX parcel service and its customer package tracking system, George Ritzer and Todd Stillman draw attention to the trend away from a person‐orientated model of customer service towards a system‐orientated model. This later, technology‐driven approach works more in favour of management rather than customers, and ultimately militates against a trustworthy relationship with consumers.

In Chapter 7, Damian Hodgson draws on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality and how control is carried out by the management of freedom. From this perspective the notion of consumer sovereignty is more akin to manipulation than liberation. Hence, seemingly innocent consumer education initiatives can be reconceptualised as part of that control, shaping and moulding a person to exercise that freedom responsibly. Chapter 8 returns us to the theme of emotion management, as Andrew Sturdy and Stephen Fineman discuss how human feelings can be commercialized. Because the management of emotions is central to the notion of customer service (i.e. to give consumer pleasurable experiences), this can result in struggles between management and employees for control of emotions. Employees can also use emotion to resist management controls, for example, mental distancing on the part of the employees and even things like “smile strikes”.

The old adage “the customer is always right” is deconstructed in Chapter 9 by Joan Manley, who takes a closer look at the premises underpinning TQM and, in particular, customer satisfaction surveys. Although ostensibly about improving service quality, she shows how such measures can be used by administrators to control, and indeed, dominate professionals in the health service. Chapter 10 emphasises the corporeality of the service encounter and the important role of aesthetics in the production and consumption of this encounter. Dennis Nickson, Chris Warhurst, Anne Witz and Anne‐Marie Cullen discuss aesthetic labour in terms of the physical and aural quality of employees and how appearance, clothing and accent impact on the service experience for both consumers and producers.

In Chapter 11, marketers James Fitchett and Pierre McDonagh explore how the promise of greater consumer power through e‐commerce is barely fulfilled and often may actually mislead the consumer. Linking in with the theme of Chapter 6, they show that most consumers actually have very little say in the e‐commerce process. Those with buying power are more likely to be able to choose (and pay for) a person‐orientated service, whereas poorer consumers will live with increasingly faceless, automated service systems.

The volume concludes with chapter from Paul du Gay who explores the cultural aspects of the service economy and shows how economic and cultural categories are intertwined within market relations. He analyses the challenges of researching customer service in the light of these implications. In keeping with the main aims of the book, he emphasises the need to go beyond traditional management and organisational concerns to locate service within broader social perspectives and concerns.

Overall, this book raises and examines many important issues for both marketing educators and marketing practitioners, and should be of interest to all of us in the marketing discipline. It forces us to rethink many of the basic tenets and presumptions that underlie the concept of customer service, and especially how our actions as marketers interact with the wider social and political structures around us.