Why Has Customer Service and Professionalism Gone Down The Drain And What Can Be Done About It

Messages like these are becoming a very common feature of social media nowadays. Disgruntled employees who leave their sucky jobs with a blast. Everybody stands up and they applaud the OP thunderously. Everybody is very happy for them. Stunning and braveness has been achieved and that makes the world a better place.

Except that it really doesn't. The opposite is also true. That is, there are many posts like this also: people wondering if it's ok to expect a good customer service as a paying customer (absolutely bonkers):

This is something I experienced and witnessed in my own country, of course, except that it was much advanced by the time I was a child. I never experienced the "the customer is always right" culture that the US used to have. Of course, that also has its downfalls, like really bad customers who use it to their advantage. But there being no accountability for employees always results in bad service and losses for companies who hire these non-professionals.

The absurd restrictions and the unemployment benefits imposed over Covid-19 certainly played a role on why there's such a shortage of employees nowadays, but this culture of no customer service is also very much to blame. The popularization of the "Karen" slur was pivotal to making this happen. Any sort of complain was and is processed and understood as a "Karen" moment. Social media is still riddled with stories and video of "Karens" who are mocked and publicly shamed for anything they do, and that also includes demanding good customer service. Some of those people are indeed awful customers but there are many who are just customers who paid for something and received something substandard. There are also many who are just regular people who were born in a free country and are seeing it collapse into a communist tyranny where people fear air and harass and even assault those daring to ignore an utterly senseless practice (wearing masks).

Thus, I cannot fully side on the part of companies because there are those that are truly awful and deserve to be dumped like this. I certainly should have done that to the last company I worked for because they never valued me and my coworkers were bullies who were unafraid to mock even senior employees from other areas, and being professional gave me absolutely nothing in return. But the problem is that being not professional results in encountering bad customer service everywhere and not being able to uphold your rights.

I'll be writing about just how bad customer service is in Venezuela in upcoming articles, and how it changed (sort of).