Is Customer Service a Dying Art?

We’ve talked about the return to the notion of craft in this space.

Whether it’s beer or cupcakes or bacon, or Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours that musicians have been taking to heart (and to the woodshed) lately, or hand-built guitar amps made in an Ohio garage, or the continuing emphasis on vinyl records, there has been a marked return to the idea that whatever it is we do, we can do it with a sense of involvement that harkens back to pre-industrial days, before mass production.

No one is kidding themselves – industrialized manufacturing, mass marketing, and comprehensive distribution remain the backbone of any commodities business, including MI. But the idea of craft runs like a widening thread through it, creating a benchmark that can leaven the entire process. And while the thread includes acid-etched stomp boxes and Pat Methany’s fabulous Orchestrion, it can also extend to more carbon-based entities. One of those would be Pablo Mastodon, who is a kind of one-man band of customer service for keyboard maker Nord. Mastodon, who works from his home in Tampa, is literally the company’s customer service department, and the availability of a flesh-and-blood person to answer technical and product questions is a complement to Nord’s handmade keyboards, which are cobbled in Sweden. “When you buy a Nord, you get me with it…,” said Mastodon, who provides technical support for U.S. and Canadian customers. “Sometimes they think that I’m a recording when they hear me and they expect they’ll have to leave a message. People are shocked when they reach someone live for the first time.”

He fell into the gig in 2010 when a local electronics business that had been handling Nord’s North American customer service decided not to continue that work. “They knew me as a kind of MIDI geek, and I started and just never stopped,” he says. He keeps similar hours as the musicians he serves, often taking calls during early morning hours, sometimes coinciding when he’s also coming home from a gig. “Musicians aren’t working nine to five Monday through Friday, when most customer service lines are open,” he says. But he does get out of the house sometimes, often to meet the keyboard techs for artists including Usher, Lady Gaga, Lady Antebellum, John Mayer, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, and Carrie Underwood when they pass through local performance venues.

Mastodon has demo units of all of Nord’s current product models, provided by American Music & Sound, the U.S. distributor of Nord and also his employer. He also has older Nord models in his collection he bought via Craigslist and eBay to help service legacy-product customers. As a technician, Mastodon, whose first keyboard was a Farfisa Combo Compact that he played in local bands in high school in the 1970s, says he doesn’t do “open-heart surgery” on circuit boards; instead, he practices self-described triage on units sent in for service.

But wherever he falls on the spectrum of technical adroitness, Mastodon sets a high bar for customer service at a time when the phrase has achieved the status of a contradiction in terms. Cornerstone companies like Comcast, which controls roughly 19 percent of subscription cable TV market – and which would have controlled over a third of the entire country’s broadband service had its planed merger with TWC been allowed to proceed – routinely comes in dead last in customer service polls. Verizon, AT&T, airlines, and other pivotal companies are not far ahead of them, and the dreaded phone trees that greet customers of even small companies these days, putting them through gyrations that eventually lead them to Manila or Bangalore before they talk to a human, have become ubiquitous and inescapable.

Which is why Pablo Mastodon makes such a difference. Even he describes what he does as “a luxury that not a lot of companies can offer.” But it is one that more companies can make a better effort at.