[cute fuzzy bunny]

Customer service is dead.

Funny though how many companies will cut customer service spending with one hand while spending twice as much in marketing to bring in new customers to replace the ones they lost through bad customer service.

A lot of companies still havent figured out this "internet" thing that lets people tell thousands about bad service, as opposed to the average of about 10 they'd tell when they had to do all their talking by regular word of mouth...

Oddly, banking has never been a problem for me. Still with the first bank I opened my first account with (Digital Credit Union). I've looked a few times for better deals but never found any, and they've never done anything to piss me off. Which is sort of amazing given the ~20+ year time period involved.

But General Electric, Paypal, Dish Network and Sams Club all excelled to give me some of the worst customer service I've ever received (and at little or no benefit to themselves), so that offsets that good bank service thing...

GE's 'state of the art automated phone system' actually has NO options to let you speak to a real person. At all. You have to call the customer relations hotline.

I can remember when companies would pay money to have the opportunity to speak to a customer and help them fix a problem, because that often led to opportunities to sell them more products and retain them for a long time...