To wonder what changed about customer service?

Because when you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. People work their arses off for a wage that you can't live on, even being very frugal, for employers who don't give a shit about looking after their staff. The employers have a like it or lump it attitude towards their employees and the employees resent it. So they adopt the same attitude.

Not enough staff. These jobs are underpaid and stressful and not surprisingly, people don't want to do them.

I have to say in terms of phone customer support, I've generally found that very good, in fact consistently better than they were ten+ years ago for things like insurance, bank.

Restaurants/bars I think has got slower and less efficient, but I cut hospitality staff a lot of slack as you can usually see that it's shortage of colleagues - you can obviously see when one server is having to cover a lot of tables and it's much more common than it was.

Adding also, that things often don't work, like the self serve tills for example. Without fail they ask if I have brought my own bags, but when I place them on the scale, they flag up as if they are too heavy. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Cue waiting for Janet to come along and punch in a load of random numbers to get the till working again. Why? Why can't we get these things right?

I do think there's been a shift in attitude from companies. Mainstream places like Tesco had a real push around customer service in the 90s. You had the things like the one in front policy where they'd open a till if there was more than one person in the queue before you. Although it didn't always translate into real life! But the aim was there. Their stated aim was to earn the lifetime loyalty of their customers.

If you contrast that with now the customer does feel like an inconvenience. I feel bad asking the person in my local Tesco Express to fix the till because she's trying to serve people at her actual till and on the self service ones. There is never a person actually overseeing the self service tills. When I worked in a shop I was expected to give my attention to my customers and she in unable to do that because of the way her job is set up.

I think that's more than reasonable of her! You say she will help the people who aren't rude horrible.

FWIW the service in my local Range in pretty good. I was in there today and a big queue built up but they got staff on to deal with it. The woman who served me did a perfectly decent job. I asked another member of staff where something was and she knew straight away.
So nothing out of the ordinary, but good keeping things ticking over. Stuff no one writes about because it's not very interesting, but it's how most interactions should be!

The biggest aspect is that now there are so few "human" interactions with organisations because so much is done online, there are far fewer staff. In the old days when literally everything was in person, there'd be a small army of real people whether in shops, office front desks, banks, utility firm town centre offices, town centre tax offices, etc etc. They'd be dealing all day with the "routine" stuff that was straight forward and simple, so the "odd" complaint or awkward customer was diluted by the dozens of "normal" nice customers with no problems. They'd also have a hierarchy of a mix of younger inexperienced staff and older more experienced ones, so the young would learn by watching and emulating the ones who'd been there longer, and the young would be able to pass on "problem" customers to their colleagues literally next to them.

Now so much is done online and remotely, the few customer service staff are now dealing predominantly with problems/complains as all the customers with simple issues/wants can be dealt with remotely/automatically online. That means the few real people left on the front line are dealing constantly with problems and complaints and are generally low skilled, not much experience, etc., so it's no wonder they're jaded with constant problems and customers are suffering with poor customer service due to lack of experience and "fed up" staff.

It's noteworthy that a few excellent organisations have far higher skilled and experienced staff on their front line, people who are more likely to deal with customer problems properly to the customer's satisfaction, who have the experience to know how to fix problems, and yes, experience in how to handle to difficult customers.

Personally, I'd never buy so much as a power lead from Currys or Argos because my experience of their staff is appalling going back years/decades, as their front line staff (counter and call centre) generally havn't a clue about consumer rights re faulty products, legitimate return rights, etc - to the extent that some of them look at you like you want them to sacrifice their first born child when all you want is to get a refund for a laptop in accordance with consumer rights laws! Contrast that with the likes of Amazon and John Lewis, where returns are hassle free, whether for change of mind or for faulty items.

I find this such a depressing and slightly patronising attitude. I worked those jobs and I took my job seriously, as did most of my colleagues. For some of us it was our career, for some it was a stopgap. But I always took seriously that my job was to serve my customers well.

Obviously there are certain things that you can't reasonably expect them to do; for example a security guard in a shop isn't going to have the same capability as say a trained bodyguard. So they have limited ability to deal with shoplifters. And I expect more attention in a super fancy restaurant than in Pizza Express because I'm paying for there to be more staff.

There are too many people. No incentive to treat us well. So depressing.

Exactly. It works BOTH ways. By the time the customer even gets to speak to someone real, they've probably been on hold for half a lifetime, forced to listen to mindless music or scripted voice recordings, and lucky not to have had their call terminated when they were down to 5th in the queue. Then organisations wonder why the caller isn't in the best of moods when they finally speak to a human. Same in shops, etc., so often having to wait in long/slow queues for the single member of staff actually dealing with customers, watching them chat idly to other staff behind the counter showing no urgency nor importance to the queue of customers.

That's what you get when there's no genuine competition. You need real competition and real choice to have any chance of customers having any say over the standard of customer service. It's exactly why the public sector is so crap these days - they know their "customers" are a captive audience with no choice, so the NHS can trot out their usual "you're lucky it's free" crap to justify poor service.

Low pay
Shit working conditions
Arsey customer before you called
Arsehole management

Everyone is defensive nowadays. The customer expects poor service so is agitated before the encounter with a staff member and the staff member deals with defensive rude people constantly, so they're agitated before the encounter as well.

People need to chill out.

More of what the customer pays funds:

• profit to shareholders
• costs of expensive technology solutions that we take for granted & sit behind (for eg) online payment platforms or easily accessed accounts, apps etc
• disproportionately high salaries to c-suite & other very senior staff

Relatively less now goes to customer facing people. They are overworked and underpaid, but because the customer is paying a lot overall, they have high expectations and don't realise the cost of a lot of the services they receive.

But if you sign the contract you do the job. You don’t take out your unhappiness with the T&Cs on the customer. Sure, join the union and agitate for better. But if you just do the job badly, you deserve to be sacked.

I disagree, she didn't go in with this attitude and she works really hard but when you are faced with a bad attitude from customers day in day out it wears you down.
As I say, she is very helpful to the nice customers but why should she go the extra mile for the rude ones? Would you feel like helping out a customer who has just called you a bitch and a whore?
Sadly, even her managers feel the same way. Good customer service should be a two way street. I have always been treated well by staff where ever I spend my money because I am always respectful (I too have worked in customer facing roles and know how tough it can be).

That's not true, and if your daughter thinks like that she is very much part of the problem.
I can't get my head around the argument that poor pay = justification for doing a poor job.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but surely if you are employed, a pre-requisite is you work to the best of your ability?

Exactly this. I don't need to know what I can do myself online, I am calling because what I want CAN'T be done online!
An annoying but new feature of live chats is a jaunty caveat about 'I am AI, I don't always get things right'. How did we get to a position when that was deemed acceptable for a customer services or helpline query? It's outrageous really.

As mentioned further up most customer facing jobs are poorly paid for jobs which are not that enjoyable.
DD16 works at The Range for £.6.40ph. A lot of customers are very curt, hardly acknowledging her at best and some down right awful (she was called a whore the other day by a lovely lady). She will go out of her way to help the nice customers but why should she give great customer service to the latter?

Customer service is a thing of the past because many customers are obnoxious arseholes.

This is why organized unions can be useful for shop workers. The individual often does not have the power to pick and choose. I have watched various young people struggle to even get a response to job applications. Actually getting as far as an offer can take ages. They’re not really in a position to turn it down.

I agree, customer service seems to be a thing of the past for a lot of firms. It really amazes me now if I receive good customer service.

That bastion of quality customer service, John Lewis, was going down the pan before Covid.
Had a horrible experience yesterday in another shop where I was just made to feel invisible and worthless, and when I left the staff simply didn’t care.

If you are paid to do a job you do it. If you don’t like the pay the time to address that is when you’re offered the job.

I think customers have, perhaps, changed.

However, having noted the frustrating situation with car insurance, where you tend to have to look for new each year to get the lowest deals, it struck me that the change was probably driven by the observation that many customers simply find the cheapest or best deal and then renew without checking, thus the company that seemed best at first shafts the customer that doesn’t bother to check the next time it comes up.

Those insurance companies always give the best deals to attract in new customers and never bother to reward loyal customers, which I think demonstrates clearly they are interested in maximum profit and that is probably the pattern that drives it.

It seems an odd model, shafting your current customers to attract in new, and I do wonder if there is space for a different model, where it’s advertised that loyalty pays. Maybe there is and I haven’t found it, but I guess few people would be trusting enough nowadays to invest in a more expensive policy and hope it was true it would remain the same and thus be better in the long term.

We book quite pricey holidays regularly, using the same online agency and always the same member of staff. He's done bespoke packages for us for years and great, friendly service.

The company has a "concierge service" that they encourage you to call with any queries; as we're about to go away this weekend, I called with a couple of queries on Thursday. To say the woman who dealt with me was surly would be an understatement.

Interestingly, our usual agent rang me about an hour later, to "check everything was OK". I'm certain he realised the snotty woman hadn't been exactly helpful!

Covid played a big part. Companies realised that they could operate with way less staff and even though service levels dropped massively, customers still stayed. So they kept doing it even post-lockdown.