Perhaps the better question is what doesn’t annoy you about Customer Service, according to results from a Consumer Reports study released earlier this month. Findings from a survey of more than 1,000 people reveal that Americans are simply disgusted with the current customer care landscape. If you came across this blog post because you have some sort of involvement in customer service (and who doesn’t these days?) this might come off as a personal jab. But let’s be honest – there’s a lot of areas in which we can improve.

In case you haven’t seen them yet, here’s a rundown of the statistics unveiled by the survey:

· 64% of shoppers left a store within the past year due to poor customer service.
· 67% of callers hung up on a call before their problems were solved.
· 8.9% of people are most annoyed by not being able to get a person on the phone.
· 8.7% of people are most annoyed with rude salespeople.
· 8.5% of people are most annoyed with a long process in reaching a solution.

My initial reaction to these statistics is that each of them has something to do with human involvement in customer service – whether it’s not being able to reach customer service or reaching rude or unhelpful representatives.

It’s interesting to note that none of the major grievances was “I’m most annoyed when a company doesn’t respond to my Tweets” or “I couldn’t find the answer to my question from a Google search.” We’re all focused on these innovative techniques for people to reach us, but if they get poor service once they find us, all those techniques are just pretty icing on a moldy cake. As it has been in past decades, when customer service was more of a good practice and less of an academic study, people’s opinions of a company are based on their interactions with that company’s human representatives. And what they want from those humans is simply to be heard, to be recognized, and to be helped.

Perhaps companies in customer service need to go back to basics.