The Death of Customer Service

Autistic Toddler Kicked off Flight

A majority of my job involves customer service.  This is mostly a fancy term for the fact that no matter what a customer says to me (within reason), I have to smile, grit my teeth and fix their problem (real or imagined). It is certainly not a field that everyone is cut out for, and good customer service is as far as I’m concerned an art.  I like to think I do pretty well on the customer service end of things, but I understand, even as a consumer, it isn’t always easy to be super, duper nice to customers.  Sometimes it takes all my stregnth not to swear at someone.  However, I’ve been noticing lately a huge decline in quality customer service. I don’t know what happened or when certain companies started to hire people who are complete assholes, but clearly customer service ain’t what it used to be. 

When I read the above article my heart went out to that mother.  While I too have been on planes with screaming children, and I understand we live in a post 9/11 world, I think the heart of the matter is that this woman feels she was mistreated.  I can also attest to some horrific customer service stories from American Airlines, so in this case I’m tempted to lean toward the mother.  My aunt and uncle worked for AA for years, and when my aunt passed away earlier this year all of her sibilngs were guaranteed flights on American. This was great, the customer service some of my cousins ran into while attempting to book their own flights on American to get them to the funeral however, not great.  One attendant told my cousin he “didn’t care,” what was going on with our family, and that he couldn’t help her.  Aside from a customer service issue, who the hell responds to someone, clearly upset by the death of a family member with that?! 

Anyway, I guess my point is, I don’t know what happened to “The Customer is Always Right,” but even without that phrase, what happened to simply being nice? 

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