Has Social Media Made Customer Service Worse?

Have you noticed how amazingly great customer service has become? Yeah, neither have I.

I don't get it. It seems like the more we are told "the consumer is in control," the worse things get.

Trying to get someone to pay attention to you - or even answer the phone - at a bank, or an airline, or a telecom company, or an insurance company or a... you get the picture... is an experience in emotional suicide.

And yet, if you're like me, you check on these things. Social media venues make it pretty easy to get info on who's good and who's lousy. But it seems like most companies don't really give a shit.

Whereas social media ought to have made businesses very aware of how important it is to treat customers well, all it seems to have done is taught them how to game the system with "war rooms" full of bullshit artists spewing out apologetic tweets and dumbass Facebook updates.

I'm starting to think that despite its promise, social media has actually made most customer service worse. Social media may work to improve service at the local restaurant level, where service has always tended to be pretty good, but at the level of the large entities that we are more and more slaves to, service just continues to get worse.

Companies now apparently believe that they don't really have to treat customers well as long as they have a basement full of interns answering complaints and digi-groveling for forgiveness.

Or maybe there's another answer.

Maybe it's consumers who are full of shit. Maybe consumers really are in control and they've made it clear that they won't pay for good service. Maybe they just go to whomever has the lowest price, regardless of how dismally they're treated.

One thing's for sure -- something's wrong somewhere.