Is customer service going to get worse before it gets better?

From Quora: A study from the UK just came out showing that 66 million complaints were made about products or services in 2014, almost double the number made in 2013.

Is customer service getting worse or are more people complaining?

My answer:

Interesting study and question. Ironically, I’ve been thinking about “complaints” for the last two days.

I think the better question is, “has bad service been hiding in plain sight and we’re just coming around to notice it?”

To answer your question here are a few points:

  • There are more people on the internet and there are also more people using social media to express their frustrations so that may be a reason in the increase;
  • The explosion of commentary on messages are thus increasing creating more problems for businesses since they may not be prepared to handle so much “traffic”;
  • We can assume that “bad service” is business-as-usual is the vast majority of industries, people have just learned to live with it.

At what point do businesses say “enough is enough”, let’s really commit to excellence.

What do you think, is customer service getting worse?