8th
I agree. As someone who works for a financial organization, and speaks to customers all day, customer service to customers seems to mean, ‘I can do, say and get away with whatever I would like, and you must smile, bare and take it.’ Seriously, people think that good customer service is the type that lets you shirk your moral and social responsibilities. I obviously cannot give any examples online, but I have some pretty strange conversations with customers about their ‘rights’ on a daily basis.
I’ve learned that “Customer Service” actually means, to most customers “I can be as big a cock as I like and you will bend over backwards to please my royal cockishness.”
Following a transaction, completely unprovoked and without my mentioning of late fees, a customer snarks, “Blockbuster doesn’t have late fees.” If we don’t bite our tongue, our usual reply is something along the lines of “Well we’re not Blockbuster” or “Maybe you should go to Blockbuster then”. Today, I decided to jokingly snark back and in one breath explained that, unlike Blockbuster, we provide a large selection of rare and foreign movies, not to mention we are independently-owned and don’t have the fortune to have people hold on to our single copy of “Expensive Criterion Movie X” for a month without a nominal fine. A reasonable response I thought. She scoffed and replied “I guess there’s no such thing as customer service anymore.”
If having unnecessary and generally misguided insults on your place of work without response is customer service, than yes, there is no such thing as customer service anymore.
