Signs That Customer Service Is Becoming Performance Art

Customer service was created to solve problems. Increasingly, however, it has come to resemble performance art, an elaborate theatrical production in which solving problems would actually constitute a  break in character.

This transformation became apparent recently to Martin Phelps, 63, a retired accountant who still carries a pocket calculator because he distrusts percentages.

When Phelps called his cable company to inquire about a $17 overcharge, he was thanked for being a “valued member of the family,” congratulated on his eight years of loyalty, asked how his day was going, and assured that the representative was “personally committed to his journey.”

“I didn’t know I was on a journey,” Phelps said. “I thought somebody overcharged me seventeen bucks.”

This sort of elaborate opening monologue is one sign that customer service has escaped commerce and entered the performing arts. Another is the increasingly ceremonial transfer.

Denise Callahan, 47, a waitress who owns a label maker and has used it on her label maker, recently spent fifty-two minutes being transferred among six departments while trying to cancel a streaming subscription.

Each representative solemnly explained that Callahan had reached the wrong department before promising to connect her with “the right team.”

“It was like watching the Olympic torch,” she said. “Except I was the torch.”

Another sign that customer service has come to resemble performance art is the dramatic pause while the representative “looks into that for you.”

Todd Berringer, 39, a forklift operator who maintains a spreadsheet ranking every pizza place within fourteen  miles of his house, encountered such a pause while disputing a duplicate charge on his credit card.

The representative disappeared for nine minutes, periodically returning to say, “Thank you so much for your patience.”

Berringer believes nothing was happening. “I think he put me on mute and ate yogurt.”

Not surprisingly, ritual apologies are now delivered with such emotional intensity that customers occasionally forget nobody has fixed anything.

When Marjorie Keene, seventy-one, a retired librarian who corrects restaurant menus with a mechanical pencil, reported that a furniture company had delivered the wrong sofa, the representative said she was “deeply sorry this experience had not reflected our values.”

Keene asked whether the correct sofa was coming. The representative said she completely understood the question.

Perhaps the purest performance occurs in online chat, where representatives vanish backstage while reassuring customers that they are still present.

Evan Ruiz, 28, an assistant property manager who owns four identical gray hoodies and considers this a wardrobe, recently watched a chat window display “I am still working on this for you” every three minutes for nearly half an hour.

Eventually the representative returned with the breathtaking conclusion that Ruiz should call customer service.

Even the post-call survey has become an encore. After spending twenty-three minutes unsuccessfully trying to change the address on her rewards account, Sheila Brackett, 56, a payroll supervisor who keeps instruction manuals for appliances she no longer owns, was asked whether her representative had “made her feel heard.”

Brackett gave him five stars. “He heard everything,” she said. “That was apparently his entire job.”

And there it is. Customer service has finally achieved the defining characteristic of performance art: nobody understands what happened, nothing has been accomplished, and on the way out you are asked how the experience made you feel.

For a curated list of Signs&Wonders, click here.