To think that customers / members of the public have become increasingly rude post Covid?

[BusyTeal]

Without posting too much info to be outing - I work in a public facing role where I am required to issue reports & other documents to members of the public or companies etc. These documents can take some time to process and (as with many other companies / sectors) we are seeing greatly reduced staffing levels and thus higher volumes of work for existing staff.

Many of my colleagues have mentioned this while we’re together, but it is becoming increasingly more common for members of the public (predominantly) but also other professionals who use our service to send ratty emails and call constantly to moan about the poor service we are providing. Pre-Covid, this was a fairly rare occurrence (maybe once a month) but it’s more like nearly daily now despite being completely transparent about the difficulties our organisation / service is facing. Side note: we have experiences recruitment difficulties long before Covid, in 2018 I was only one of two team members on a team that should have been 8 strong!

Not only are we seeing higher numbers of “complaints” but also the tone of the correspondence is much more tense, often to the point of being blatantly rude, disrespectful and downright offensive to staff and the organisation as a whole.

Am I being unreasonable to see this as a “post Covid” after effect, or have others seen this trend too?

I’m becoming increasingly weary, over four years down the line, of companies still using “staff disruption at this difficult time” as an excuse for their poor service, when it’s really down to WFH arrangements lowering productivity, or understaffing, or just general poor business practices. I’m never rude to employees about it, but I can see how spending up to an hour waiting in a queue and being told their wait is apparently due to Covid-related issues might drive some people to saltiness.

Absolutely agree with this - we are lucky in a sense that we have direct phone lines to staff publicised so it’s never a queue situation, but I do wonder if it’s maybe our wording of our ‘warning’ that we have low staff numbers that might hack people off as it has been going on for a long time (not sure if there is a solution to that though…)

The public are pissed off and angry and need a dog to kick and unfortunately customer facing staff are it because there are little or no concequences for doing it.

There'll be a whole host of "It's never ok to abuse someone but......(Insert excuse here)" justifying it, or deflecting it back and saying that so many customer service people are rude, or over reacting to 'constructive criticism'.

It's mainly because people have identified a target they can vent their frustrations on with no repercussions.

Definitely. Rude and also less considerate of public sapces in general. People seem to have forgotten that we all need to behave in a certain way in public to make the public space pleasant and tolerable for everyone else.

It's not just rudeness, but other things that impinge on the public space to its detriment. Examples from my daily life in recent weeks: loud music being played on speakerphone on trains; people putting their feet up on bus seats; people strentching out on park benches with shoes and socks off; people eating hot spicy and smelly food in the cinema (this one really flummoxed me; why would you take a hot takeaway meal into the cinema? You can't even see what you're eating!!); queue jumping; pushing past without an excuse me; entire cartons of leftover takeaway food being dropped, food, carton and all, on public pathways.

I think it's a combination of covid, loss of trust/pride in share spaces, and also everyone being on their phones which means they're less aware and therefore less respectful of the physical world around them.

More complaints because service is worse and more expensive

Yup! I've noticed it with patients too (normally during bank shifts tbf). My husband is a teacher and he's noticed a huge difference!

Covid has definitely changed peoples perceptions od what is socially acceptable now I think.

Blame your bosses for reducing staff numbers and giving no other recourse to complain about poor service except to front line staff.

I think people generally have higher expectations/ sense of entitlement for many reasons. Some are very selfish.
I see it myself at work (frontline NHS) and observe it for example in shops.

I very politely call it out if a patient is being rude. I was in a situation recently and I explained (when it had calmed down) that it had been very unsettling for me and this shouldn’t be what I am subjected to when providing a good service. The person was shocked that I had addressed it and apologised. The behaviour they displayed was not due to the health issue I was supporting with.

I'm not so sure it's covid's fault as much as people having increasingly less patience in an instant gratification world. That combined with more places being short-staffed and it's not a good picture. Of course never acceptable to be arsey to people trying to help you, especially if they are short staffed (I always try to be understanding of that and show it when you can see someone is straggling).

I think its a number of things.

Firstly, there's a huge loss of social interaction. Partly this is caused by WFH, but its also proximity to people in general. If you live on your own, and work from home, even doing your weekly shop now means that you're not interacting with anyone. Using a self-service checkout means you don't have those face-to-face interactions anymore, which means we're all losing our social skills.

But also, businesses aren't helping matters. Remember back in the day when Tesco (I think) had an entire advertising campaign saying if more than one person was in front of you in the queue they would open another till point? Not to much these days. I went to ASDA a few weeks ago, they only have one regular till open now - they want you to put week shops through their self-service desks. But the volumne of shoppers means that often the handheld devices are unavailable - or charging. When I went, the devices weren't working, so there was 9 of us in the queue for one open till - all of us had done the "big shop"

The lack of care or interest from staff was ridiculous. There were three staff members hanging around - clearly they were the "floating members of staff" who grab things, but it wouldn't have taken any initiative at all for each of them to jump on a till and serve some customers to get that queue down. I assume they weren't allowed for whatever reason, but it does show why customers are getting ratty.

But also call centres are still regularly banging on about "unexpected call queues" - no, they are entirely expected, you just can't be arsed to do anything about it.

I wonder if the lockdowns, mask wearing and social distancing caused us all to become more detached from each other. The lack of things like casual chat left a void in day to day life.

Some people could be taking longer to go back to normal than others and for some this detachment could be permanent for them.

It sounds like management of expectations early in this process is missing. Take that up to management - it requires a review and action of some variety.

"completely transparent about the difficulties our organisation / service is facing"

The reality is your clients don't give a fig if you're down by 80% on team members, they want to know what you're going to do about their service / report etc.

Expectation management needs to be started and up front when your services we are being engaged.

"Thank you for your booking / request / report. At this time, reports are taking x weeks for delivery, which starts from today and the product will be sent out as close to the anticipated date as possible. You will be kept informed of any changes to this date".

Yes, I e noticed this. I wonder if it’s also social media and all the self help that’s out there about boundaries etc and people are also sick of being so accommodating and now feel they have a right to say what they want in the name of self care and exerting boundaries and it just comes across as rude. Also, I think there is a huge metal health fall out from Covid which just seems to be getting ignored by the Government.

Yes it’s about managing expectations. People who remember how it felt to use your service when it was fully staffed are bound to feel less satisfied.

People are definately more entitled and way ruder than they were before covid. I work in an entertainment business (and worked in the same place for three years before covid) and you would think we forced people to be there the way some of them come in with faces like smacked arses determined to have a row.

Just in the last two weeks we've had - making comments about getting refunds 'because they'll have a good time then make some shit up', complaining that Google maps didn't work, blaming us for the traffic and parking, scowling at staff trying to be friendly.

We have more people demanding discounts than ever before and getting arsey on phones and in person if we do not reduce the price of their experience.

Our customer service manner has not changed, nor has the personal, bespoke experiences we provide. Yes, the prices have gone up the same as everywhere else in the current climate.

The general public want the moon on a stick, for free or cheap and woebetide us if it is the wrong shape!

Absolutely. People can be vile and ever so inconsiderate in how they present themselves towards strangers. It says an awful lot about a persons character the way they treat customer services staff.

I do wonder sometimes if the lockdowns caused us to forget how to behave in public.

We have so many rude customers at work now - and they’re rude from the get go - I answered the
phone to someone this morning who was thoroughly obnoxious and angry that no one had replied to his email. It was 8:45am and we don’t actually open until 9am and he’d emailed at 8:30pm last night. The first time he’d ever contacted us.

Pre-Covid we rarely dealt with rudeness.

Customers also seem to expect stuff immediately and are horrible when they’re told it’s not possible, or we’re fully booked so they’ll have to wait, or if something they want is flat out impossible. I was ranted at the other day because I’d made someone’s child cry when we couldn’t fit them in for the timescale they wanted - what was I going to do about it/they wanted a discount, etc. No way and I’m not really sure what your child crying has to do with us tbh.

We make luxury items related to the leisure industry so nothing life or death.

My bosses are great. They won’t tolerate rudeness and call it out every time. We just won’t work with someone who behaves like that - if they’re arseholes to start with, it’s pretty much a given they’re going to be an utter pain in the arse during and after their job so they can fuck right off.

It’s pretty apparent that if you’re waiting in a phone queue and are told it’s a 30 minute wait, you’re going to be annoyed by that and wonder why more staff aren’t deployed to reduce the queues. Particularly when you then get the recorded message telling you that you can find an answer to your query online. Well, clearly you can’t, because you’ve already tried that, the chat bot is hopeless and the only way you’ll get something approaching an answer is to try to speak to an actual person.

I have no idea whether working from home has exacerbated the problem. I don’t know whether people log off their screens to do something and leave customers waiting. I don’t even know if that’s possible.

Physical stores seem to be reducing staff too. Sainsbury’s has three manned tills, but only one is open at a time. The space for smart shop or self scan is too small really, for packed trolleys, but that’s what you have to do to get your shopping. We wanted advice on some technology in John Lewis. There was literally no member of staff in the department, except for a rep from a TV brand.

I don’t think it’s surprising that people get fed up. You’re expected a lot of the time, to rely on technology and when it doesn’t work, what then? Car parks have apps, but they’re all different and who wants to be faffing around for the right one, then finding it doesn’t work, then you have to try to find a number to call.

I also think that people have become much more entitled and far less to,era t over the last few years. Car drivers, cyclists, dog owners, people on public transport, in shops, theatres, restaurants and so on. Everyone wants to please themselves and not others.

I think in some industries, it's due to a lack of competition and the relative difficulties of switching providers.

Some of the worst companies for long phone wait times are broadband providers, hard utilities like water/gas, and phone companies. These industries are all essentially oligopolies with very few very large players. They know you're not likely to switch, and if you do switch, it'll be to one of a very small number of 'competitorsd'. Therefore they are simply not incentivised to treat their customers well.

Cntrast this with industries where there is a somewhat healthier market (in terms of competition) - eg insurers, private healthcare providers, gym groups. It will quickly become apparent that the wait times are much lower - they really want and need your custom, and therefore don't want to keep you waiting.

@Bluevelvetsofa it's not
Screens, phones, toilet time are all logged

Every Monday morning people ring and complain about the queue
There's a phone call back you can press that will prioritise you. We are open sat and sun and early evening
People would rather ring at 9am on a Monday and queue for 45 mins than ring on a Sunday when it's so quiet we get 30 mins between phone calls

And housing associations. Large ones like Sanctuary and Clarion so there is no excuse.

Most large public sector organisations treat their stakeholders like shite, though. HAs, NHS, GPs, councils. They know they have a captive audience who cannot take their customer elsewhere because there is no 'elsewhere'. Therefore they are not motivated to treat their stakeholders with respect.

The logical end point of the public sector's contempt for the public is the 8 hour bread queue in the USSR. If your 'customers' have nowhere else to go, what is the point of giving them a good service?

@CantDealwithChristmas I waited an hour for an insurance company to answer the phone.
@spikeandbuffy I’ve tried at all time of the day, except Monday morning and Friday afternoon. The last time was Thursday afternoon.

Were you trying to make a claim?