Who has the best customer service?

I think it’s getting slightly worse but I’m not certain.

My theory is that two related things might be happening:

1) Outsourced customer service to agents that learn a flowchart, some simple software and can therefore only really help in a handful of simple ways. They’re not invested in the business, and they’re incapable of and not empowered to take action on the issues that require a bit of creativity. That would be too time consuming and costly to the business.

2) The above strategy is enabled by modern business analytics tools being available to all businesses — large and small — over the past decade or so, and this has led to a lowering of standards in the actual customer service activity that we would like to see.

The reason that it causes standards to go down is that In the past, none of this could be measured well, but it was obviously important, so good businesses placed a priority on getting good, empowered employees to fill those positions. Now all that matters is keeping average response times and ratings above a certain level, which results in a lower bar being met, mostly sustained by those simple common issues that arise.