If you've ever been at your wit's end with a customer service rep who can't help, you may be a victim of an "accountability sink."
iStock; Rebecca Zisser/BI
It's one of every traveler's worst nightmares: You arrive at the boarding gate to be told your flight is overbooked and you've been bumped.
You complain at the counter — you have an important business meeting or you don't want to miss your friend's wedding. Can't they bump someone else?
However, the attendant tells you there's nothing they can do to help. Company policy is final.
While frustrating, the gate attendant is not at fault — and that's the whole point. Companies create algorithms to decide who is bumped from a flight, ensuring that the system's decision is final and no one employee is accountable.
It's an example of what economist Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink" in his new book "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions — and How the World Lost its Mind."
Corporations absolve their employees of responsibility by delegating decision-making to an algorithm or deferring to company policy. No one person is empowered to make a judgment call, and the customer's frustrations are moot. It's not just at airlines; technology and an increased focus on streamlining processes to cut costs have allowed companies in all kinds of industries to create accountability sinks.
Davies told Business Insider that once a decision like bumping someone from a flight is made, "then it's just natural to create an accountability sink."
"You don't want any accountability there because you don't want to have pressure put on anyone to change the decision," Davies said.
While technology can optimize decision-making processes, it can also prevent customers from reaching someone with the power to make a decision that strays from the corporate script.
In the case of the sympathetic gate attendant telling the disgruntled customer, "'We've got a policy, there's nothing that can be done,'" Davies said, the customer's negative emotions are ignored and poured into a void — or an accountability sink.
"That's the situation that people find so incredibly frustrating," Davies said. "Because it's bad to have decisions go against you, but it's absolutely psychologically intolerable to feel like you're not being listened to."
According to Davies, accountability sinks emerged over the past decades of privatization and technological innovation.
In the 1980s, he said, free-market capitalism and profit maximization became the norm, spearheaded by economist Milton Friedman and championed by Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in the UK. Since then, companies have focused on profits, growth, and maximizing shareholder value, according to Davies, which in turn has created accountability sinks.
Following the technology boom of the 1990s, Davies said companies developed computer systems to make decisions for them because of the volume and complexity of information.
In addition, middle management and customer service jobs were cut or outsourced as corporations prioritized profits, optimizing costs, and delivering strong quarterly earnings.
"The big problem with cutting the feedback link is that you're cutting off all of your own sources of information," Davies said. "And so your customers can be getting steadily more and more annoyed with you, and you won't really know that."
In the case of the person at the airport, Davies said ideally, any customer bumped from a flight should be able to talk directly with an employee with some level of decision-making power.
"The answer is usually there are no more flights going, and there's nothing that can be done, but just simply having that experience of someone listening to you, in my view, is just really, really important," he said.
Of course, accountability sinks aren't just at the boarding gate. You may have experienced similar frustrations when calling your internet or cellphone provider, bank, or credit card company. It often looks like a customer service representative working within a system with limited options to help.
Accountability sinks can range from customer service to decision-making at major corporations. According to Davies, Boeing is a company rife with accountability sinks. The airline manufacturer is at the center of legal troubles stemming from two deadly crashes in 2018 and 2019, and an incident in January when a Boeing 737 Max's door plug came off mid-flight.
Davies said decision-makers at Boeing have been too focused on share buybacks and optimizing costs in recent years while accountability sinks developed around manufacturing quality.
In March, when Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced his resignation, he told CNBC that Boeing had a "bad habit" of focusing too much on delivery time, which might have given the message that "the movement of the airplane is more important than the first-time quality of the product."
Nonetheless, Davies said accountability sinks will eventually catch up with companies.
"Over time, it degrades the brand, and the resentment builds up," he said. "At some point, there's just going to be this huge bump where you get back to reality, and all of the accountability you've been pouring into this sink for the last 10 years comes back and hits you in one massive lump."
Do you see accountability sinks elsewhere in life? This reporter wants to hear from you. Please reach out at jtowfighi@businessinsider.com.
