Would You Like to Do it Yourself? Service Requests and Their Non-granting Responses

Abstract

Many organizations have inherently conflicting goals when it comes to customer service. On the one hand, they must provide their customers with the service they desire to ensure a large, loyal patronage. On the other hand, the cost of providing those services can become very expensive and thus curtail an organization’s profitability. In order to remain solvent, organizations must keep the cost of providing customer service within bounds. Almost inevitably, this will result in a circumscription of services; some customer requests simply cannot be granted.

The data for this paper was collected in a research project conducted by a group of social scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center. The following researchers were part of this project and contributed to this chapter: Robert J. Moore, Geoffrey Raymond, Jack Whalen and Marilyn R. Whalen.