To think that customer service in a lot places has really gone downhill?

[thingscouldbemarvellous]

Seem to have experienced quite a few examples of really poor customer service recently. Aibu to think that customer service has gotten really poor in some sectors? No one seems to want to help anymore!!

@ny20005

I think customers have gone downhill.

So entitled, demanding & rude. People have go so much worse since covid. Try to deal with that with staff shortages as well as what people have going on in their Personsl lives

Hell yes. I work in customer services and people have gotten so much worse. I won’t even blame covid because it started before that.

I haven’t seen it personally- we were out at a restaurant last night and experienced really good customer service to be fair

I've experienced some dreadful customer service recently- lots of it wasn't the individual employees fault, but the company as a whole.

I have also experienced random rudeness in shops from staff (H&M and M&S) which was totally unexpected as I'd been nothing but lovely and polite to the staff. I think the staff member in M&S was at the end of a long day having to deal with difficult customers, but I wasn't one, I'd simply asked "Please may I try this on?" and was very told off because the fitting rooms close at 4pm (there were no signs saying so). I don't mind about the changing rooms being closed, I just want people to talk kindly to me.

But I went into London yesterday and received lots of amazing customer service from shop staff and restaurant staff who really knew their products and couldn't have been friendlier or more helpful.

But I also think shoppers can be really rude also- DD recently started a part time job and says sometimes people are so horrible to her for no reason she wants to cry.

So even if the customer service you receive is shit, I don't think ranting at staff is the way to go, it needs to be addressed higher up.

It does work both ways
I booked a table for a special meal whilst on holiday
Booked it well in advance and offered to pay a deposit
They declined
They also didn't record my phone number so didn't tell me they were short staffed and had closed on the evening of our booking
Everywhere else was fully booked as it was a weekend in a popular spot hence us booking in advance
Their cock and bull lies when we queried them was appalling
We had to travel a long way to get an alternative and spent half a day trying to book somewhere
If businesses Can't be arsed to even let customers know they have cancelled them how can they expect customers to treat them well
I would never no show
And with 3 kids working in hospitality I always treat staff well
But it is a two way street

@tttigress

If you complain the blanket excuse for anything is "Yeah, but Covid"

Because most of the time the reason is covid so what do you want staff to do?

Whether it's issues at one or multiple points in the supply chain, product availability, staff availability, staff burnout, shopping restrictions etc it is mostly caused by covid (and in part Brexit)

The problem is that staff often do not have all of of specific facts or do not have time to explain the ins and outs of every single small issue in the process to every customer mostly because they don't want an answer they just want to shout at someone and have defaulted to "Because covid".

Perhaps it’s the start of the revolution: the workers are turning 😃

I do think the pandemic makes it more difficult for businesses to provide the level of service we would want. Isolation is one factor meaning we are often short-staffed. Please also respect that we need to keep our staff safe and their workplace covid compliant. This can mean communication is compromised & the service not as seamless as we would like.

The shop I used to work in paid just above minimum wage, so unsurprisingly a lot of the staff did just above the minimum amount of work. No Karen, I'm not going to go above and beyond when I'm paid peanuts an hour and you're being rude. Especially if the shop shut half an hour ago and I'm not being paid at all.

Visited my old workplace recently. In addition to the covid screens there were big signs by each till stating that abusing the staff would not be tolerated. That interested me as when I'd worked there we were expected to take any abuse with a smile. It must have got a lot worse and I suspect they've had some issues retaining staff.

I think (retail) customer service was bad long before covid.

You'd go into a shop and you'd either be hassled from the minute you walked in (Lush, Benefit etc) or be completely ignored if you dared to want to buy anything.

No wonder "everyone" shops on Amazon.

No Karen, I'm not going to go above and beyond when I'm paid peanuts an hour and you're being rude

And your reason for using the sexist, ageist trope "Karen" is....?

Please do not use it again. If you don't like the way someone behaves, criticise the behaviour. Sexist, ageist name-calling is offensive.

Before COVID there was the odd customer that would be really bloody rude and demanding after COVID I’d say that it’s 50/50 whether they are going to be pleasant and polite or plain nasty. I’ve been shouted at and sworn at so much I considered quitting my job which is in DH business and just staying home instead. There’s no need for the way some people behave. We have been genuinely battling to meet peoples expectations but with delays from our suppliers, the industry going crazy busy and staff having to isolate we have genuinely been struggling to keep up. I can’t answer for other industries it may be an excuse but COVID has certainly caused us some headaches and is continuing to do so.

Both customer behaviour and customer service is terrible. One doesn't excuse the other.

I don't argue back. At my company we have a no tolerance policy with verbal abuse now. There was a time when I would have used my skills to try and reason with them (with varying degrees of success) but now as soon as someone's abusive they get a warning that it won't be tolerated and if they do it again i terminate the call. To be honest I worry about the mental health of our customers since covid, as many of the abusive ones will make a nuisance of themselves by persistently calling back and being abusive, despite it not getting them anywhere!

Re tradesmen, I fully accept that they are inundated with work and so might not need to respond to a query (though they must realise people have long memories and might not ask again for a quote when leaner years for the tradesmen arrive)

However, we rang a tradesman for a quote. He said he;d be here at 11.00 am today., 11.30 am and not a peep so DH rang - “sorry” said the tradesman “family emergency. Can I come later?” Now I get it that domestic emergencies happen, BUT, that emergency clearly didn’t prevent his answering the phone so he could just as easily have had the common courtesy to ring ator before 11.00 am to explain. Just ignoring an agreed appointment is discourteous and in our opinion showed a cavalier approach to time keeping that meant we would trust him to do the job when he promised anyway,

I haven't noticed any difference in customers.

But then I work in complaints. So the customers I deal with have always (largely) been arseholes anyway.

A lot of customers are very demanding when shops are clearly under staffed.

An example for me at work today (small food shop), trying to deal with two deliveries while manning a checkout. We have two self service tills but people insist you serve them despite clearly being busy.

Customer demands I go through all the produce because they found one bad strawberry. Of course we check, but maybe try looking around and realising we don't have time for that.

Staff aren't being rude, most are being expected to do a lot with not enough resources.

I think customers have definitely become more rude, impatient, and demanding. There is definitely a level of entitlement and expectation that everything is instant.
I work in a pharmacy and am shouted at on a daily basis for stuff that is beyond our control. The biggest problem is people on holiday who have forgotten their medication (tourist town), they come in for help, which we are more than happy to give, we point them in the right direction to get an emergency prescription sent to us so we can dispense their medication (usually within 1-2 hours if they get straight on the case). However, we then get huffing and puffing about the fact they are on holiday and shouldn't need to run around to sort it out even though it is their own forgetfulness that has put them in this situation.
Walk in patients expect to hand us a script and be given the medication straight away, however, there is a process, they have to be entered on to the system, the script validated, the stock picked, scanned and labels produced, then it has to be dispensed and then checked by the pharmacist. This is done as quickly as possible but sometimes the pharmacist is already dealing with other patients but they think they are the only one in the building.
Then there are the customers who come to the pharmacy to ask for non medicinal shop items or to pay as there is a queue at the tills etc, it is an exhausting job made worse by rude and entitled customers.

To echo PP, have you got any idea how difficult it is dealing with customers right now?
Staff needing to isolate or being off with Covid or needing time off after their vaccine, customers being more and more demanding and entitled.... it's bloody tough. Not to mention people going through things in their personal lives with annual leave scaled right back due to variances changing because of the amount of staff off at times.

I work in CS too (online retail) and everyone now wants their orders immediately and so many just don't speak to us like we're real people. Customers expect every independent business to work like Amazon and be able to deliver something ordered on a Sunday afternoon by Monday morning. And if something goes wrong, customers go directly to Trustpilot without contacting us first even though we'll always go above and beyond to help as long as we're given the chance.

Popped to Homebase today and sign on loos saying closed due to COVID
Door was unlocked so went in anyway, glad to report that Covid wasn't lurking in the loo!
It's getting ridiculous now

@justaweeone

Popped to Homebase today and sign on loos saying closed due to COVID Door was unlocked so went in anyway, glad to report that Covid wasn't lurking in the loo! It's getting ridiculous now

So a company has closed their toilets because of covid and you have used them anyway? Perfect example of customers totally disregarding staff and doing whatever the fuck they want ...

Covid is not lurking in the toilets, but my company's covid rules meant that someone had to clean the toilets after every use. For most of last year we barely had enough staff to cover our actual jobs so any extraneous tasks were cut so we could stay open (as a supermarket we stayed open all the way through lockdowns)

Since the cafe was closed we no longer had to legally keep the customer toilets open, so they were closed along with the fitting rooms in the clothing department (which would have also required deep cleaning between customers and were required as they were the only place we could use for all the stock that we had to quarantine or 3 days when it was returned) so that the cleaning staff could focus on keeping the essential/high traffic areas of the store clean and the staff who work in the clothing department could be redeployed to other areas of the store that needed help due to shortages caused by staff shielding/isolating as well as requiring time off to deal with caring/childcare issues.

@justaweeone

Popped to Homebase today and sign on loos saying closed due to COVID Door was unlocked so went in anyway, glad to report that Covid wasn't lurking in the loo! It's getting ridiculous now

But who is going to clean the toilets? If everybody uses them ans they're not being cleaned they're going to become really disgusting. I went to Homebase last week (many times as I was decorating and indecisive) and they seemed very short staffed. It's not the individual person at the from of a tills fault they're short staffed, but as they seemed to be the only person working in the store they were having to deal with grumpy customers who had had to join a very long queue and answer questions the customers had. It wasn't great, but it's not on being grumpy with the only visible employee in a large store. I'm sure she'd much rather be somewhere else.

Using the toilets which are out of use for customers is a typical example of what retail staff has to put up with

In a store with shared staff/customer toilets the decision to close to customers so staff have a CLEAN safe place is not uncommon. Customers DO NOT respect that.....says it all really