Good customer service is a thing of the past. AIBU ?

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In the last year I have had cause to complain to a couple of companies. The customer service I have received after the complaint has been shocking. Very slow response, having to use online forms generating automatic replies, no available phone number to speak properly to a staff member and a general complete lack of awareness of a customer's needs. The first complaint was last year against Ryanair and took 9 months to resolve, the second is ongoing but after waiting 3 weeks to a reply to me email, I rang the only available number to be told they are sales, don't deal with it, don't have a number for complaints. When I asked what I should do then and was told to send another email(that generates a generic standard reply of 'we'll get back to you in 21 days') I said I wasn't happy and was asking to speak to a supervisor when the staff member said " If i can get a word in...." AIBU to think this is not the way to speak to a customer? Granted, I wasn't happy but I was not being rude or shouty. I used to handle complaints for a large building society and would have been seriously reprimanded for saying that.

It's hard to know from someone's report whether they have or haven't had good customer service. Some people are literally impossible to appease, unfortunately. Others are happy to have any kind of resolution, even if it doesn't suit them entirely. It's a subjective experience.

Have to put a good word in for lush too - was buying a gift for someone who was fixated on a particular smell (friends daughter with autism who loved lavender)
Emailed them to ask which products would be suitable and explained why, they sent me the whole lavender range for free!

YABU to base your generalisation on 2 bad experiences - both with companies that you know cut costs to the core.
There is undoubtably some really poor customer service out there, but there's also some very good customer service too.

I have had great customer service from Jet2. We have been away with them twice now and in both cases they went over and above their remit to provide good service to us. I would happily use them again.

I rarely get poor customer service. I think part of it is that I use companies that have a good reputation for service and part of it is how I communicate with them. I can be assertive, but polite and friendly at the same time. People who are rude and arrogant get rudeness and arrogance back.

I'll never use ikea again as their customer service is appalling.

The customer service I had from Next a couple of weeks ago was second to none. They couldn't have done better if they'd tried.

Have you checked the Complaints proceedure? Most places stet that it can take up to 28 days after they receive the initial complaint on order to investigate what happened.

nickname With JET2 we booked a holiday and arrived to find we had been moved to a different complex, not like the one we had booked. No prior notice, not even told at check in at hotel. We had to ask ourselves when we didn't recognise the pictures online. Would you be happy? No JET2 rep seen in whole week either. Emailed on return and took 4 weeks to get response with some money returned. Not great.

As I said before, it's not the initial customer service I am referring to, it's when you have a problem or complaint. I think that is when you see how good a company is and you can sometimes think more of them if they handle it well than if you hadn't had a complaint. things do go wrong after all.

I think that overall, customer service has probably improved over the years (with obvious and very frustrating exceptions of course). Social media has at least enabled the public to name and shame when things go wrong and the majority of companies do care about their image. Not all though: I'm looking at you Talk Talk.

I'm of the era where you werent allowed to own your house phone and if you needed the GPO to put you a line and phone in, you could wait months. Ordering anything 'mail order' was very iffy, it may or may not turn up and you had nowhere to go if it didnt. Claiming on your house insurance was a complete lottery and claims often got turned down for spurious reasons.

The other thing that has improved is companies will now put something right when they have cocked up. I recently got £90 from Barclays because they hadnt dealt well with an issue I'd had. Boden have given me apology vouchers too.

.

M&S. Needed to find out about a product, phoned and was given a number, which I contacted. "This number is not in use." OK then, you've just lost what could be considerable business.

It's all contact by email, with an automated response. I don't do much complaining. I've never ever, ever had vouchers, flowers, anything at all.

My car was involved in an accident nearly 4 weeks ago now. Still can't get 1st Central to email back to settle the claim and they take about an hour to answer the phone. Am starting to inderstand why they were cheap, it's true what was said up thread about the cost cutting coming from somewhere!

Does anyone know what the normal time frame is for getting a payout from a car ins claim? They have no awareness that people need a car to get to work!

Twitter is your friend. My partner's phone broke 3 months ago and after much tooing and froing including waiting weeks for Virgin to send a box to return the phone/forgetting the return label/taking ages to look at it/returning it to the wrong address (amongst other things) he was offered a refund on the £28 PCM he had paid per month in charges for a phone he hadn't had use of. Apparently they 'didn't do compensation'

Well, two tweets later, he had £84 in compensation to apologise for the inconvenience/time spent on phone calls/time spent on emails/failures by Virgin to supply a service.

Result.

My DD bought a bag from Superdry the woman who served her talked to her colleague all through the transaction my DD complained on Facebook and got a £50 voucher, we went for a meal it was awful she complained again and got a voucher again, we've been quite lucky

Netflix have INCREDIBLE customer service. I wish things would go wrong sometimes just so I can call them

I suspect it's something to do with being based in the US

British Airways are the worst! We flew first class and were treated like cattle, their service was appalling from checking to landing and on return. British Airways response, our experience was not bad enough to warrant any form of recompense. I asked just how bad it had to be and was ignored.

A lifelong traveller with BA since a small child, and many times a year, I have voted with my feet and gone to Emirates.

I second Talktalk

Cannot even begin to describe how poor their customer service skills are.

We had a shocking time trying to close a bank account when my grandad died. Sent the death certificate etc. All sorted we thought. It was still amassing charges on the account.

My df spent hours on the phone with them "yes we've received the death certificate for the account holder, would it be possible for you to put him on the phone though?" my df ended up saying "no you can't speak to him, he's currently in an urn on my wife's mantlepiece. We had him cremated, so he's not actually available for conversations what with him being dead and all!"

It was like that bit in the great marigold hotel and would have been funny if it wasn't so bloody awful and upsetting. UK based call centre.

How awful starky I am having a similar problem with Talkmobile.

I'm just coming to the end of a 6 month building project, and so have been ordering all sorts of stuff from all sorts of businesses, some on-line and some walk-in shops. On the whole, I have found the customer service to be really good. Two small businesses that made a minor mistake with my order responded immediately to my email and sent out the correct part the following day. My local plumbers merchant was super helpful and I was very pleased with the bathroom and en suite I bought from them.

The only company that was utterly shit was Hotpoint. I know they are managing a crisis at the moment with their tumblr driers, but I have had real problems getting a replacement part for my Hotpoint oven. Their customer service lines are so busy that you can't even get through to hold most of the time so have to spend several hours redialling. They missed 2 engineer appointments - complete no show- with no notification of why the engineer didn't come, and the one appointment that was kept was several hours late. I was then lied to about why that engineer had not attended in the expected slot and about efforts to contact the engineer. I was promised on several occasions to get a call back from managers, which never happened. Incompetence is one thing, but telling deliberate falsehoods to you customers to keep them quiet takes poor customer service to a whole new level.

Starky so sorry your DF had to go through that. Dealing with a death does seem to bring out some classics in customer services. Some companies were amazing, Natwest, BT, utilities when we had to do the same for my mum - nice quick understanding phone calls with no fuss.

Some companies who should really know better were dire - a AVC Pension company I had to deal with made me go through the whole story of my mums (early) death and to explain it was a death in service situation each time I spoke to someone - I think the maximum was 4 times in one call. In the end a work colleague who could hear I was getting upset, took the phone off me, demanded to talk to a manager and explained what I had just had to do and how despicable it was! Was sorted pretty quickly.

Talktalk I will never touch with a barge pole again - hold music was bad enough the first 30-45 secs of about 6 songs on repeat - hard to listen to when you are on hold for 30 mins!!

Amazon was mentioned up thread as being good - but when my account was hacked and money taken from my card I was pretty disappointed with them.

I'm here to give B&Q a well done. I've needed several tricky to sort things done recently with minimum hassle and good humour.

My advice, as soon as possible speak to a human and get their name down.

Also, when things are sorted, make sure they are thanked and if possible that their manager knows.

With talk talk, I emailed Dido Harding directly and her secretary called me back. This was after weeks of being told any old bollocks on the phone by the call centre. Worth a shot, if anyone is still having trouble.

Ryanair have changed O'Leary decided being rude to customers was counter productive so he sent out an executive order "In future be nice to the bastards"

It's not much better in Canada. According to the Twitterverse, the official slogan of Air Canada is "We're not happy till you're not happy".