The economy is bad. Very few people can argue against that.
When the economy is bad, people have less money to spend and therefore are more selective as to which goods and services they buy. it would make sense that businesses would improve their customer service in order to draw in picky consumers, right?
That hasn’t been my experience. As a matter of fact, it seems things are getting worse. Store clerks seem less interested in helping. Verizon nearly destroyed my cell phone account (through no fault of my own; someone switched my first and last name) and it took me hours of being transferred to finally correct it. My dry cleaning service was late on the promised delivery date and lost a pair of my pants. Their response was essentially, “Well, that’s life. What do you want from us?”
This post wasn’t as much meant as a rant as to to help gain some sort of understanding as to why customer service hasn’t improved in the bad economy. Any guesses?
Small business owner here. The economy has hurt me/my business. Sure, if I work harder and kiss ass I might be doing a teensy bit better, but ISTM that things can’t get any worse. Just a guess.
In a bad economy businesses were more about cutbacks and cost savings rather than improvements.
Lay off a bunch of your co-workers, eliminate raises for the year, cut out needless perks for employees, elimate bonuses for the year and you get a bunch of unmotivated unenthusiastic workers.
In any economy businesses almost all tend to see customer service as a cost center to be cut, not an opportunity to improve their bottom line by retaining more customers. Nobody wants to invest in offering good service. I think it’s a mistake. But it makes sense in a good economy as well as a bad one.
I agree these days good customer service is hard to find. It won’t change when the economy gets better. You just need to get used to being treated badly. It doesn’t bother me but I noticed that people in fast food places don’t even bother to say thank you.
Exactly. Front-line service workers don’t care as much about retaining customers (even though it indirectly benefits the businesses and thus themselves) as much as they care about the immediate environment, where their job is potentially threatened and they’re stressed from bills etc. That’s always going to win out and put people in a sour mood.
Actually, my recent experiences with customer service have been positive. But it is true generally that businesses spend more time and effort to get new customers than to keep old ones. I get sales calls from Bell Canada practically once a month but they have never even tried to find out why I left. In principle, they know from their own records that they left me without any phone service for 7 days, but it has never occurred to them to promise that won’t happen again. Maybe they can’t because they have cut their repair services to the bone. But they could at least offerred me a cell phone (they are big on cell phones) for that week.