What’s happened to customer service?
As the title suggests, I’m sitting here wondering what on earth has happened to the idea of customer service.
When something goes awry, sometimes we need someone from the company to intervene and hopefully help us out… but sadly over the years, what those agents on the other end can do, has eroded away to nothing more than a single solution, maybe two… and a number of psychological manipulation tactics that are geared to get you toward one of those solutions, even if none of them actually meet the need you have.
Let me tell you my situation that sparked this post— I take an acid reducer that, sadly, I’d run out of this morning. I’d forgotten to get some and by the time I’d realized it, Walgreens/CVS had closed… so I ordered them on Amazon, seeing a “4 hour window” delivery option available. I thought that was great, so I paid the extra $4.99 to get it delivered within a few hours, thinking everything would be fine. Also my car’s key fob battery is dying, so I’d ordered some batteries to be able to replace it… I placed the order and thought nothing else of it. I then looked at the order some time later, and saw it was just marked as … “Undeliverable.”
No explanation, no reasoning, nothing just… “sorry we couldn’t deliver it.” - Don’t apologize to me and not offer a solution. I went through their AI-heavy “chat” bot which basically offered me the option to pick pre-canned responses, and ask for a refund… it then told me I couldn’t get one until 4 days from now… so now my items… AND my money… were being held hostage by this multi-trillion-dollar company for 4 days, all because of a vague ‘Undeliverable’ designation on my package? Come on…
I then tried incessantly to get a human on the other end of the line, and when I finally did they told me the items had become damaged in transit and thus could not be delivered, and the system had automatically initiated a refund— Fine, okay, great… so… why couldn’t it have told me that on their automated system? Why did I have to jump through those hoops to find that out?
It wasn’t that easy to get a human on the other end, then I felt like I was getting pre-written “copy and pasted” chat messages… “I apologize from the bottom of my heart that you are having this issue.” — Fine, if you want to apologize to me go ahead, but don’t if you don’t have a solution you can offer me instead…
I asked if another delivery attempt could be made tonight… no.
I asked if a refund could be issued tonight… no.
So… I just have to go to bed hoping that… my key fob will work tomorrow despite the low battery level… and my acid reflux won’t flare up before I can manually go and get the medication I need…
Dear Amazon… I was a customer, I needed help… I needed service, all I got was empty apologies and you holding my money hostage… I don’t feel like I’ve been taken care of. I don’t feel like I’ve been “serviced” as a customer. You can do better.
Why did this happen? Let’s wind the clock back.. maybe… 20 years ago. Companies were smaller, customers’ experience was more important and more highly regarded by companies…agents had the ability to issue refunds… but that all has eroded away recently with the rise of outsourcing, and corporate growth explosion.
Refunds have to go through endless approval steps… there’s no way to send a message to a delivery driver to reattempt delivery, but this is 2026 where that technology clearly exists. It’s not been implemented; why?
There’s a whole rabbit hole we can go down trying to unpack this but at the core of it… the root… is where the problem lies. Customer service, is dead. We’re left to fend for ourselves. Click that “Buy Now” button… it’s no different than rolling the dice in Vegas. Will you crap out, or will you win something? Will you get your order, or be forced to go down the unnavigatable rabbit hole that has become our only lifeline for reaching out for help to the company… at the end of the day, we just don’t know anymore.