Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Click photo for larger image. Signs of low customer service Tracy Pavlick, owner of Anonymous Shoppers and Assessments of Pittsburgh Inc., sends mystery shoppers into businesses to rate their service. Based on their experiences, Ms. Pavlick believes there are three primary sins committed by stores that don't pay enough heed to customer service: Ignoring the customer. "In retail," she said, "you need to find the mental picture of the customer to meet their needs. So if someone comes in looking for a black skirt and your employees stand there for five minutes talking with each other, you're not doing that." Not taking care of line buildups. It's amazing how many businesses do not have a rule that every employee is supposed to drop whatever else he's doing if lines start to lengthen at cash registers, she said, but it's a common shortcoming. Not helping customers find what they need. In too many stores, Ms. Pavlick said, employees tell customers where an item is located by pointing and saying, "It's three rows down." In the best customer service outlets, employees will walk the shopper to the item. Web exclusive Tales of finding poor customer service On the Internet For more information, check out these Web resources: The American Customer Satisfaction Index, www.theacsi.org/overview.htm. Video of DHL commercial about customer satisfaction, www.yourdhl.com/ourads.asp. -- Mark Roth

A Saturday in August. A woman goes to a local dry cleaner. While she's waiting to get her pickup ticket, the clerk begins talking to someone who's in line behind her. Finally, she has to interrupt to get the clerk's attention. Upset, she goes to a Starbucks next door to cool off with an iced coffee. While she's waiting for her change, the same thing happens: This clerk also starts talking to an acquaintance who's in line behind the woman, ignoring her as she stands there. ...

Stories like this aren't hard to find.

Ask almost anyone you know, and without much effort, she can come up with at least one recent anecdote about frustrating, apathetic or downright rude behavior by a store clerk or salesperson.

And that doesn't even count the indignities of endless phone trees, sullen government officials, overseas help desks, phone directory assistants based in another state, frazzled hotel employees or distracted airline workers.

Is poor customer service becoming more common, or is this simply an example of how whining always rises to the top in America?

Whining will probably always be a national pastime, but several studies suggest that the decline in customer service is real.

Despite a slight uptick this past quarter, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a survey run by the University of Michigan, has dropped for most of this year and is at one of its lowest levels in the past decade.

A survey this year of 2,000 customers in the United States and Great Britain by the management consultant Accenture found nearly half the respondents had switched service providers in at least one industry because of poor service.

An IBM survey during the last Christmas shopping season found that lousy customer service was the second worst irritant to shoppers, exceeded only by long lines -- and undoubtedly, understaffing contributed to both problems.

There is even a national TV ad campaign that capitalizes on all this consumer angst. Thirty-second spots by delivery firm DHL show a rapid-fire sequence of scenes from customer hell -- a waitress sloshing coffee on a diner, a woman stranded in the rain as a gas station attendant ignores her, a bagger slamming a jug of milk on top of other groceries -- all to a saccharine rendition of "What the World Needs Now."

The ad concludes with the narrator saying, "Whatever happened to customer service? At DHL, it's alive and well."

Karen Jones, vice president of brand, advertising and promotions for DHL, said the response to the ads has been strong, and she's received several letters from people saying, "Yes! You tapped into what is going on in the marketplace."

Ms. Jones said the company's research had shown that "there's this general discontent with customer service in North America across the board. It's one of the most demanding markets in the world, but the level of service is perceived as one of the poorest."

One expert who is convinced that things are getting worse is Ramon Avila, the George and Frances Ball distinguished professor of marketing at Ball State University.

Dr. Avila, who heads the H.H. Gregg Center for Professional Selling at Ball State, said that the large national chains that increasingly dominate the retail industry are moving to "leaner and leaner labor models, where you have fewer people on board."

It means that even the national chains that used to be known for their good customer service, such as Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Home Depot, are beginning to get lower marks as they move to smaller, less-experienced and more part-time staffs.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette From left, Catherine Mitro, Linda Torrence and Shirley Huminsky at Ross Park Mall, where they walk and shop. All three once worked in retail, and they say they all have seen a decline in customer service. Click photo for larger image.

Wal-Mart in particular has slipped in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, falling six points below industry leader Kohl's by the end of last year and coming in seven points behind where it was a decade ago.

"It is true that we are a very cost-conscious company," responded Wal-Mart spokesman Marty Heires. "But I think it is a false impression that we have lost our emphasis on customer service, because that was really what our company was founded on."

The retailing giant has a much higher percentage of full-time clerks than the industry average, Mr. Heires contended, and it still emphasizes founder Sam Walton's "10-foot rule" -- that a clerk should make eye contact and communicate with any customer who comes within 10 feet of him.

But Dr. Avila said there is no doubt in his mind that customer service is deteriorating.

"My frustration is that companies now hire people and put them on the floor and don't train them on customer service basics," Dr. Avila said. That leads to "everything from 'That's not my department,' to 'I'm new here,' " he said.

As a shopper, Dr. Avila said, he notices two kinds of problem employees. One is the group that won't make eye contact with customers. "At least if you're making eye contact you can tell if a customer is lost or needs something."

The other comprises the employees who've "got a clipboard and what's on that clipboard is more important than the customer."

Even if understaffing is now going to be a fact of life in many stores, Dr. Avila believes it's possible for employees to satisfy a customer's needs 90 percent of the time. It baffles him that any store would ignore that, because it can cost a lot of money in the long run.

"The lifetime value of a customer is easy to figure out," he said. "If you spend $100 a week in a grocery store, that's $25,000 over five years, and if you're going to lose that customer over an argument over $1.69 of hamburger, for instance, that's ridiculous."

The apathy of many clerks today was perplexing to one group of women who were gathered at a local mall recently. Catherine Mitro of Ross and Linda Torrence and Shirley Huminsky of McCandless go to the mall for regular exercise and social time. All of them worked in retail jobs earlier in their lives, and they've noticed a big change from the days when they were employed.

"They have cut back so much on the number of people," Ms. Torrence said. "And while I don't want someone to be fawning over me when I go into a store, when I remember how we used to be trained to smile at every customer ..."

"Even the nastiest ones," Mrs. Huminsky interjected.

"Yes, I mean we'd kill ourselves to get a customer to smile back at us," Ms. Torrence said.

"I was in a store recently," Mrs. Mitro added, "and the clerk was moaning, 'Oh, there's two more hours to go. I can't wait to go home.' And I'm thinking, she should be thinking that's two more hours she has to earn some money."

Claes Fornell is the director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

While anecdotal reports of bad behavior, like the Burger King fiasco above, always tend to be worse than the overall reality, his index shows that customer satisfaction has been declining recently.

And that spells bad news for business, he said, because, with only one exception over the past decade, a decline in customer satisfaction on his index has always been followed about three months later by a parallel drop in consumer spending.

The reverse also holds true, so businesses have a bottom-line reason to pay more attention to keeping people happy.

Dr. Fornell, the Donald C. Cook professor in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, said there are two basic ways to keep customers happy in retail -- good service and low prices. In recent years, the retail industry, led by the world's largest firm, Wal-Mart, has put most of its emphasis on lowering costs and prices.

Now, he said, "there are troubling signs that [Wal-Mart is] able to put such pressure on cost that it becomes very difficult for everybody else to provide high levels of customer service" because they are scrambling to remain competitive.

Understaffing and poor training certainly play a role in this, he said, but in many ways, the real culprits are customers themselves, "because we vote for price over quality."

Dave Ratner, a customer service consultant and owner of a small chain of pet stores in Massachusetts, agrees with Dr. Fornell's concerns.

"If you read some of the consumer reports, customer service to many people is not that important. They want a deal."

He sees it in the parking lot outside his local Costco. "When I look around that lot," he said, "it's all BMWs and Mercedes. These women are carrying out 55-gallon drums of Tide and putting it in the cars themselves."

But Mr. Ratner is not convinced that the big chains will inevitably win out.

Smaller stores can be successful by focusing on customer service, he said, and "this is what gives me some hope for independent retailers."

At his chain, Mr. Ratner won't hire an employee unless he achieves a certain score on a standardized customer service quiz. After that, "everyone who comes to work here signs a piece of paper that says I understand the most important part of my job is to get the customer to come back and that I am empowered to solve the customer's problems on the spot."

A similar philosophy prevails at Molyneaux Tile * Carpet * Wood, a small local chain, according to co-owner Pat Molyneaux.

Mr. Molyneaux makes heavy use of "secret shoppers" -- customers who are paid or given a discount to shop in his stores and then fill out customer satisfaction surveys that rate everything from a clerk's behavior to the quality of the installation.

He lists his own cell phone number as the customer complaint hot line.

"What happens is that every salesman gives his card to a customer, and he knows if they're angry about something they can call me. It's really burdensome to me, but it allows me to really keep tabs on customer satisfaction."

If aggravating behavior is increasing in many stores, it may not be happening just on the sales side of the aisle.

Jean Johnson, executive vice president at the nonprofit group Public Agenda and one of three authors of a 2002 study on the decline of civil behavior in American society, said that rude, impolite employees may partly be echoing a growing stream of rude, impolite customers.

While her group's survey showed that nearly half of all respondents had walked out of a store because of poor service, it also revealed that nearly 4 out of 10 people admitted they were partly responsible for the growing lack of courtesy in America.

It's an old story, Ms. Johnson said, and it plays out like this:

"You start out from the house in the morning and before long someone cuts you off, and then you can't get someone to wait on you in a store, and then you call your insurance agent and you can't get someone on the phone and before you know it, you're behaving rudely to somebody else."

In the survey's focus groups, this kind of trickle-down effect was a common theme. "It's what people often said to us, that rudeness is a vicious circle -- but so is kindness and politeness."

We can only hope so. Otherwise, there may be more of this: