The Customer Is Not the Craft

No one claims to be able to pilot a plane after taking many flights. Regardless of how many meals you have eaten in Michelin restaurants, you will hardly believe you can win a star yourself. Purchasing a house does not give you the confidence to call yourself a builder. Going to the doctor often does not give you permission to open your own practice.

But why do so many people believe they understand, and can lead, customer service operations simply because they have experience as customers?

I can tell bad food from good food. I can tell bad medical advice from good medical advice. That makes me a competent consumer. It does not make me a chef or a cardiologist. Consumption teaches you to judge outcomes. It teaches you nothing about producing them. These are two entirely different forms of knowledge, and confusing them is one of the oldest and most expensive mistakes in business.

Yet customer service is the one discipline where this confusion is not just tolerated but institutionalised. Executives who would never dream of overriding their CFO on tax law, or their legal counsel on contracts, will happily redesign a contact centre operation over a weekend, armed with nothing but the memory of a frustrating call to their phone provider. Nobody walks into the engineering department and says "I use software every day, so let me restructure your deployment process." In customer service, people do the equivalent of that constantly, and with total confidence.

There are multiple reasons for the trivialisation of customer service, but most come from the same source: the belief that it is a minor field, requiring less expertise and no real experience. It is treated as the department of common sense. And common sense, everyone assumes, is something they already have in abundance.

Here is the problem. I understand how a plane works at a theoretical level. Lift, thrust, drag. I would still crash one if you put me in the cockpit. That is why so many customer service operations crash. Having a theoretical understanding of how something works does not prepare you for the reality of how it works.

Yes, you can study productivity. You can learn what AHT means, how occupancy is calculated, how shrinkage is measured. You can read the definitions in an afternoon. But unless you have spent years inside contact centres, you will not know what those numbers do to the people being measured by them. You will not know that agents cheat the system. That they will transfer calls to reset the clock. That they will cherry-pick the easy tickets and leave the ugly ones ageing in someone else's queue. That they will close cases prematurely to hit resolution targets, knowing full well the customer will reopen them, and that the reopened case will conveniently count as a fresh one. That they will park themselves in the right aux code at the right moment. The dashboard will glow green while the operation rots underneath it.

Then the executive looks at the data and asks: "Why are we not closing enough cases?"

Wrong question. The cases are being closed. That is precisely the problem. What is not happening is the resolving. You built a system that pays people to close, and people, being people, close. They respond to the incentives you actually created, not the intentions you had when you created them. Anyone who has run a floor knows this in their bones. Anyone who has only read about running a floor is perpetually surprised by it.

This is where the real cost of inexperience shows itself. It is not that the inexperienced executive lacks information. Information is cheap. He lacks judgment, which is expensive, because judgment is only acquired by paying for mistakes over many years. He has never sat with an agent at the end of a shift and understood why she games the survey trigger. He has never watched a "quick efficiency win" add ninety seconds of silent workaround to every single interaction. He has never seen a forecast collapse because someone in finance deleted a shrinkage buffer they considered padding. So he makes decisions the way a passenger would fly a plane: confidently, right up until the moment of impact.

And here is the part that should trouble anyone who thinks seriously about how organisations work. The people making these decisions rarely pay the price for being wrong. The agents pay it, in burnout and attrition. The customers pay it, in hold times and repeated contacts. The frontline managers pay it, explaining numbers they never agreed to. By the time the damage is undeniable, the author of it has usually moved on, slide deck intact, convinced to this day that the strategy was sound and the execution failed him.

Customer service is not the absence of a craft. It is a craft. It has its own body of hard-won, mostly unwritten knowledge about how humans behave when you measure them, queue them, script them and pressure them. That knowledge cannot be acquired from the customer's side of the counter, any more than surgery can be learned from the patient's side of the scalpel.

So the next time someone tells you they understand customer service because they have been a customer, remember: so has everyone else on earth. If that were qualification, it would be the only profession with eight billion experts. Judging by the state of most service operations, it clearly is not.