Americans and our indifference to rude customer service
When rude employees at the gym saved me money
Writer’s note: This post was originally published on Medium’s “We Need to Talk” on January 16, 2020.
Have Americans gotten so used to bad customer service that we’ll just shrug it off? I thought about that recently while writing “How Culture Impacts Service Expectations — and Why Americans Settle for Less.” In a survey of 20,736 people from 19 countries, surveyors asked if they would pay for better service. Forty-seven percent of all consumers said that they were open to paying more for a service experience that exceeds their expectations every time — with frustrated customers almost twice as likely as satisfied consumers to be willing to do so.
One parking attendant would only hold the valet passes by the edge of his fingernail as though it was drenched in too much black.
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But what caught my attention the most was that people in the United States (31%) and the United Kingdom (28%) were the least likely to be willing to pay for it. Meanwhile participants in China (81%), Germany (63%) and Italy (61%) were completely on board. In all fairness, 20,736 doesn’t even make a dent in the amount of people who live in my hometown of Chicago (2.7 million), and a different group of Americans may have come to a contrasting conclusion. But I thought long and hard about this one, and I’m in the group that wouldn’t pay for better service either.
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