Customer service trends 2024: 5 insights you can’t ignore
What does the future hold for customer service in 2024? And how can you equip your teams to navigate the unexpected? Find out the key trends for customer service.
From rude service reps to byzantine phone systems with endless hold music, it’s not hard to find examples of bad customer service.
Research reveals the poor state of customer service. According the 2023 National Customer Rage Survey from Customer Care Measurement and Consulting (CCMC) and the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, 74% of Americans say they’ve had product or service problems in the past year. Anger over poor service and shoddy products has even led some customers to plot revenge.
While post-pandemic customer satisfaction in the United States increased 1.3% to a score of 75.1 on a 0-100 scale in the third quarter of 2023, it remains substantially lower than it was in 2018 when it topped out at 77, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) reported.
Opinions vary when it comes to bad customer service examples. We certainly all have our pet peeves. But several bothersome trends have risen to the top that could come back to haunt brands if they don’t improve how they treat customers.
- Rude service reps
- “Firing” customers unjustly
- Inaccessible human support
- Hidden fees, cut-rate service
- Left in the lurch
So rude! Bad-mannered service reps
While many customer service reps are super nice and pleasant to deal with, we usually only remember the rude ones. Unfortunately, examples of this kind of bad service are on the rise.
Industry watchers like John B. Goodman, vice chairman for CCMC, say there’s been an overall decline in civility that’s invading workplaces because people – especially younger people – have spent too many hours behind anonymous computer screens saying whatever comes to mind on social media.
For example, a mom who was treated rudely at a fast-food drive-through window quickly discovered that the offensive service person was her daughter.
The incident points to a serious issue: rudeness is the No. 1 reason customers will dump a brand, according to Shep Hyken, customer service and experience expert and founder of Shepard Presentations.
What’s needed, experts like Hyken say, is better screening to weed out jaded personalities during the hiring process – and more moms calling out their kids for rude, discourteous, and apathetic behavior.
The 2023 National Customer Rage Survey found 41% of consumers believe companies and organizations should provide front-line staff with anger-management training for dealing with problematic customers and courses to strengthen their customer focus.
Bad customer service: “Firing” customers
Some brands now ban problematic customers – for life.
There can be good reasons for a brand to take such extreme action. For example, scammers engaged in “return fraud,” cost the retail industry more than $100 billion in 2023. And we’ve all seen entitled customers flipping out and treating store clerks horribly.
46% of US consumers admitted to yelling at a service person or raising their voices, up from 35% in 2015, according to the National Customer Rage Survey. More than 20% said they believed making verbal or physical threats was acceptable in some service situations.
“There are some customers that you do not want to do business with because they suck so much time, effort, energy, and even money from the brand,” says Hyken. “The adage about the customer always being right isn’t always true.”
Still, taking the extreme measure of kicking customers to the curb instead of training employees to deal with them more empathetically can not only come off as heavy handed, but blow back on brands if patrons are unjustly or erroneously barred and go on to bash them on social media.
A brand needs to make it clear to a customer the reasons for the termination and should provide a means to rectify the situation.
No human support: Chaos at the pharmacy
Nobody likes long wait times, but a labor shortage, caused in part by the pandemic as well as sporadic staff walkouts, has reportedly made it difficult for nationwide pharmacies to deliver the kind of service customers expect.
What’s more, many products now sit inconveniently behind locked plastic sheets to deter theft, forcing customers to hunt down clerks to retrieve them. Making matters worse, The Wall Street Journal reported that one chain is piloting a policy of not answering the phone. Instead, they’re sending customers to voicemail and promising to have a pharmacist call them back.
Denying fast and convenient access to human support staff is a prime example of bad customer service. And it’s one of the top reasons customers are increasingly enraged these days, says CCMC’s Goodman. Some brands are even obscuring or eliminating online support numbers to deter calls while others are deploying phone systems that don’t immediately reach people, he says.
“One pharmacy, for example, took a perfectly fine voice system that could fill prescriptions, update you on their status, and connect you with a pharmacist — and changed it to ‘make it better’ and add more functions,’” he says. “Now, it takes you down a rabbit hole half the time and is a complete disaster.”
Goodman says there’s a mistaken belief that if customers don’t make the effort to call service lines that means they’re fine. But CCMC research shows that one in five customers who have a problem never reach out and go straight to criticizing brands where they can.
Budget airlines, cut-rate customer service
Customers trying to save a buck with budget brands can run into real problems. The airline industry is a leading example, where budget carriers rank lowest on the industry’s American Customer Satisfaction Index in 2023.
What’s behind that? While you get a low base rate to book on those airlines, all sorts of hidden additional fees may apply that can reportedly push costs up to 736% higher. Baggage fees are a common culprit. Then, fliers are treated to iffy on-time arrivals.
“Airlines have never been a top customer satisfaction performer; quite the opposite,” says Forrest Morgeson, research director for ACSI and an associate professor of marketing at Michigan State University.
“They understand that they’ve got pricing power and customers have limited alternatives, so they sometimes pay less attention to services customers care about, which can decrease satisfaction.”
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Left in the lurch: Bankrupt dentistry ditches customers
There’s nothing quite like buying a product or service from a company offering their lifetime guarantee assurances, then watching that vendor go bye-bye.
That’s what reportedly happened late last September when Smile Direct Club, a publicly traded, Nashville, Tenn.-based orthodontics provider filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Many patients, some of whom had already paid the remote dentistry large sums of money, were reportedly told that they needed to go elsewhere for treatment. Refund information was unavailable.
The lesson for brands: if you care about your legacy, don’t offer what you can’t deliver. Savvy customers will eventually shun you and publicize their poor experience.
In fact, consumers are giving brands less opportunity to redeem themselves after a bad experience. The “three strikes you’re out” rule-of-thumb still applies, but it’s slipping. According to a Shepard study, consumers in 2023 were willing to give brands 3.1 chances to do better before switching to a new company compared to 3.4 chances in 2021.
Reversing the bad service trend
Bad customer service examples will always be with us. It’s just natural for some companies to get it right and many others to botch it.
But some industry watchers say the trend of continually decreasing customer satisfaction ratings could reverse as technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) improve and become “human” enough to quickly address common customer service needs.
“I wouldn’t expect there to be long-term, sustained, satisfaction declines,” says the ACSI’s Morgeson. “I’d expect to see a positive reaction as we deploy better and better automated technologies across industries in the next five to 10 years.”
