When did customer service plummet?

I think it's bad in a lot of businesses/industries anymore.

I have been surprised at the amount of people who have no clue of what's going on in so many professions lately ! I  know my level of customer service suffered while I was caring for my mom. But I  have seen examples in many industries  of stuff that even in my shitshow stages of running my bizz would never happen. 

 It is scary how little a lot of people seem to care about their job these days. My mind has been blown more times than  old Billy Clinton was in  the white house. 

I think it has been on an exponential downward trend since everyone started using the internet. Now most problems can get solved online without interacting with a person. So now the majority of actual calls they get are from frustrated customers who are having to break the norm and call on the phone. I don’t mind talking to a person but I’m 44 years old and remember life before Al Gore invented the internet. 

Private Equity

ASV best customer service ive had in years. After dropping my bike over and turning my brand new lever into a tea cup handle, I reached out and the ASV service rep took care of me, started my return, sent my lever 2nd day air, arrived in time to take the bike on my cross country trip.  All this at no charge

Plus DEI

Which is same same in a way

rando chuckle I had yesterday: called local restaurant for a reservation. Just a mom/pop location. I had to endure this epic 2m long voice message about how "Press 1 for our menu, 2 for our location, 3 for reservations, etc. etc etc" and i knew damn well that one 17y old kid answered all of those extensions. Why put the customer threw it? By the time I got to the kid, I was annoyed. All you can do is shake your head, I guess. 

I have had good experience buying bikes from babbits online.  Responsive and honest and immediately took care of problems.  

But yeah.  Must companies these days seem to over charge, do marginal work, attach a warranty, then make it almost impossible to get anything covered by the warranty.  It's so frustrating.  

They need to hurry up and get you off the phone so they can go back to applying for higher paying jobs to cover their living expenses.

As someone who has a business that has to do customer service, a huge part of the issue is customers. They have zero patience. Want things yesterday. Blah blah. It’s brutal to give folks service and customers have gotten worse in the last few years. 

"Quiet quitting" may have been a thing before Covid but I remember hearing about the concept exponentially more during Covid when people were flat out told that they were not "essential" workers. Since then I feel like the majority of the service industry has made a conscious decision to quiet quit.

Wut? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve read recently. PE exists to extract value. That’s the purpose of it. DEI isn’t even remotely close, whether you agree with it or now, and I bet not a single motocross company has any sort of DEI police of any kind. 

Slow down. Look at what companies are owned by PE, and then oh look imagine that they all also push ALL the  current agendas including DEI, but sure yeah dumbest thing yet.

Okay I’ll bite, show me your data and evidence! 

Let’s see the smoking gun of 1) that PE is all DEI 2) that companies in question have bad service and finally 3) that DEI is the reason for that bad service. 

I’ll wait patiently for you to connect the dots for me!

I can’t. A person convinced against their will, is of the same opinion still.

So, what you mean to say is that you have literally zero evidence to even try to support your claim.

Precisely. Or rather I’m not about to embark on this research project to prove to somebody that DEI inherently produces a worse product. 

I could spend some time find all the data and for what? 
 

If you choose a candidate on anything other than merit, it’s going to lead to a worse product, and as of late they are choosing based on everything BESIDES merit.

But it’s all pointless and hopelessly off topic.

Well, customer service sucks because of enshittification and because customers expect people to do things yesterday. 

PE is huge fans of enshittification.

It has nothing to do with DEI and your original comment was insanely dumb so I’m just taking time to point out how dumb your comment was. 

Carry on!

Bingo. When private equity comes in, quality, customer service, passion, and employee satisfaction go out the door. The dollar takes over and it's no longer about providing a quality product and taking care of your employees. It turns into cutting costs (we all know this means corners), and there's never enough. It's never enough money for them. How can they pay their employees less, use cheaper and less materials, and outsource everything physically possible. I can go on and on about this. The only real solution I have is to support small businesses, and avoid the big brands/companies where it's possible. My effort is futile in reality, though. Look at the small vendors just in the moto world that will bend over backwards for their customers. 

ETA: I would like to add a good experience I had. I bought pegs from Raptor Titanium a few years ago. Thought I wanted offset pegs but changed my mind before installing. Long story short, I sent a quick email asking if I could exchange them, and they had the standard offset pegs at my door in a week. From Britain!! They had absolutely no obligation to help me, and it was my fault for choosing the pegs that I chose, but they are good people. 

I call it the Walmart times. 

Hey these baby diapers have shit in them, I want a refund!!

This half eaten pizza tastes like shit. I want my money back. 

Walmart, along with Costco will take anything back. Most in the motorcycle industry can't afford to take everything back. 

I had a good employee that had a shit attitude and I had to fire them because they would tell the customer to fuck off. 

A great example happened today. Customer calls, has a door panel off of a new SXS machine that the tab broke off when he took the panel off and reinstalled it. He wanted it warrantied. He didn't buy the machine from me nor has he ever bought anything from me. What's even better is that this guy is my neighbor. So my new guy comes to me and asks how I want to handle it, I tell the new kid to tell him to fuck off and that he is an idiot. Real quick after I said that I told him to tell the customer to call the dealer that he bought it from and ask them to help. It would be a battle to get the manufacture to cover something like that after you had just tried to install it. He called the dealer he bought it from and that dealer told him that we should be able to handle it just fine. Oh boy. Now I am loving it. I'm not going into the rest of it but that is just a small sample of what we deal with. 

I can assure you DEI most definitely exists at one of the large online retailers.

If you think the customer is the problem, you should close whatever business you have.

Shouldn't any dealer be able to handle a warranty claim regardless where they bought it?  Why would you send your neighbor back to another dealer.  The better question is why did your neighbor buy a product you sell from a competitor?  Maybe because you tell customers to fuck off?  I bet you are awesome to do business with lol

On the bad customer side, I’ve seen people who were absolutely at fault breaking something, blatantly lie to get a free replacement and get mad when told no. Warranties, insurance companies, whatever they can suck a dollar out of.. 

On the business side, a lot of employees just don’t care at all. The RV industry has a lot of that.

Since we’re on this topic, my sons Stacyc had its gears snap last week. It is about 10 months old. I contacted Stacyc and they sent everything I needed for free and I got the parts in 2 days. I was very impressed with their customer support. 

theyve cooled off on ESG, but no ESG, no money. blackrock on down. 

Fuck me some customers are the absolute worst.

To be fair, most products have become lower quality and more expensive.  That might tick off customers.

The thread was about customer service plummeting and somehow turned into customers are the problem.  OP, you have your answer.  When the guy behind the counter or on the side of the email or phone already assumes customers are the problem....that business will be terrible to deal with.  

It's really easy to focus on the one or two customers that are a pain in the ass, but the 100's that are not suffer because of it.  If you don't want to deal with the customers, choose a job or business that doesn't.

All business has followed suit toward automation vs human. The pendulum has swung hard in that direction currently. Business will exploit the automated approach for as long as possible before they start to feel impact on their bottom lines. Then, just maybe the support of humans will come back a little bit.