Is Customer Service Dying?

July 10 -- If you've ever heard the phrases, "Please hold to listen to our menu of options," "That's not my area," or "We'll be there sometime between 8 and noon," you might wonder that you ever get any service at all.

That America is a service economy is one of the great truisms of recent decades. And there's little doubt the service sector has become one of the dominant engines of the U.S. economy.

Where once manufacturing jobs outnumbered service jobs, the reverse is now true. And for the first time this year, a service enterprise extraordinaire — retailer Wal-Mart — topped old-line economic giants Exxon Mobil and General Motors as No. 1 on the list of the Fortune 500 companies.

Yet in some industries, customer service has been waning.

This is especially true of the transportation, communications and utilities sectors. Customer satisfaction in these areas has dropped 7 percent since 1995, according to the latest University of Michigan Business School's American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Some states have noticed this trend firsthand. Texas' consumer protection division, for example, says the number of complaints it receives has skyrocketed since 1996, reaching 39,776 in 2001. California has also seen a rise, with around a third of the state's 31,345 complaints related to customer service issues.

"There's been a skyrocketing number of complaints, especially about telephone companies, since deregulation," notes Janee Briesemeister, senior policy analyst with Consumers Union's southwest regional office.

Complaints Pile Up

So what are consumers complaining about?

Some of the most frequent complaints received by the California Public Utilities Commission are from customers unable to reach a person on the phone, or about telecommunications companies that aggressively market new services and then don't deliver on their promises to customers.

"They do seem to focus around two areas — billing problems and customer service," says Briesemeister.