Cleanup in the self-service aisle.

A year or two ago, my local grocery store installed four "self-checkout" stations. I was very excited. Not only did they allow me to indulge in my childhood wish to play "cashier" (though, when I was playing cashier as an eight-year-old, it was the old-fashioned "tik-tik-tik-ding!" cash registers I wanted to touch), the process allowed me to observe my own bagging rituals. At any given trip to the grocery store, at least one quarter of my groceries are heading for the office: frozen lunch entrees, fruit, breakfast cereal, and canned soup and tuna for the days I run out of lunch entrees. When a bagger does the job for me, I end up having to ransack all of my grocery bags in the car later, separating out what I'm taking home from what I'm taking to work. I've observed that the average supermarket bagger artisan gets a tad hostile when I try to micromanage his or her bagging work.

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The self-service checkout seemed a wonderful solution to all of my complex supermarket issues.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And then I began using it.

At any given checkout experience, I hear one, if not all, of the following directives from the computerized checkout martinet: "Item not scanned. Please scan again. Please scan again. Please scan again." "Please put the item in the bag. No, in the bag, please. Now. Put it in the bag." "Please wait for cashier assistance."

On average, three out of every five of my self-checkout experiences require the human attendant to come over and do something mysterious: type in a secret code, unlock something, pass her hands mysteriously over my low-fat gorgonzola salad dressing to enable the bar code to scan, examine my vine tomatoes closely to make sure they're not masquerading as the cheaper regular tomatoes.

Generally, this involves a delay that merely erases any benefit of heading for the self checkout.

Then there are the days when there is no attendant to be seen. "Hello? Anyone? Can you come and whisper to my portabella mushrooms and make them scan?" Because it's too late to start again, I'm forced to wait until the attendant chooses to come back.

There are also the days when the store closes the self-checkout lines entirely. Isn't that great! They spent all of that money and effort on the slick, time- and cost-saving self-checkout lines, but it's too much trouble to pay anyone eight dollars an hour to attend to them. Did they think just by installing them their overhead and customer complaints would drop mysteriously?

If they do, they're not alone. Many call centers get very excited about the prospect of instituting customer self-service. They read the promises of ROI (just as they did with CRM several years ago), generate the purchase order, install the system and ... are perplexed when they find the number of calls escalating to live agents and the number of customer complaints actually rising rather than dropping. "But customers LOVE self-service," they say.

And I love to ride on airplanes, but not if I discover that the unorganized teenager who sold me my Diet Coke and magazine in the airport terminal is flying the plane. You would never install an IVR without thoroughly testing what the navigation is like for a customer (would you?); but many companies seem absolutely convinced that their self-service technologies are perfect immediately out of the box and they're caught by surprise when their metrics move in a negative, not positive, direction.

Other companies decide to transfer all customer processes to self-service simultaneously, rather than implementing them in stages, making sure they work and allowing customers and agents to get used to them. This would be the equivalent of visiting the supermarket and discovering that, not only do you have to check yourself out; you have to slice your own deli meat, stock the shelves, wrap your salmon fillet at the fish counter, unpack your produce and do your own "cleanup in aisle six." Talk about "abandoned shopping carts" ... literally.

Customer and employee dissatisfaction with CRM systems quickly became obvious to companies that didn't take the time to determine their (realistic) needs and expectations, implement the solutions carefully, successfully connect them with their legacy systems and train their employees properly. Generally, the poor CRM interactions involved a company employee who noted customers' negative reactions and brought them to the attention of a supervisor.

Bad self-service is a stealth destroyer for many companies. Often, customers simply abandon the interaction, then the company, with the organization being none the wiser.

Now, if I can only learn the magic incantation I must whisper to my zucchini to make it go "beep."

By Tracey E. Schelmetic

Editorial Director, Customer Inter@ction Solutions

The author may be contacted at [e-mail].