There was a time, dear reader, when “customer service” meant something. Not a slogan. Not a pastel-coloured icon of a smiling headset person who clearly has never met an actual customer. It meant you rang a business, a human answered and you both behaved like adults. You had a problem, they had a product or service and together you marched bravely towards a solution.

Now? Now customer service is a mythical creature, like the bunyip, a unicorn, or an NBN technician who arrives within the promised two-hour window.

We live in the age of “We value your call” and “Your experience matters to us,” which is corporate code for “We have built an obstacle course between you and any form of accountability.” And the prize at the end of the obstacle course is not resolution. It is a recorded message telling you they are experiencing “higher than normal call volumes”.

Higher than normal call volumes, hey? I wonder why. Could it be because you’ve made it impossible to contact you unless the customer has a law degree, a spare afternoon and the patience of Job?

The Gardener Who Won’t Garden

Let’s start with the gardening maintenance company. You know the type. Their website is full of cheerful promises and glossy photos of trimmed hedges and smiling retirees holding a cup of tea while someone else does the hard work.

So you hire them, because you’re a reasonable person and you think, “I’d like my yard to look like a yard, not like a jungle that’s applying for World Heritage status.”

They arrive. They do some mowing. They do some whipper-snipping. They blow leaves into exciting new configurations, often into corners you did not know existed. Then they leave.

You step outside and realise something important has not happened.

The weeding.

Apparently weeding is now an optional extra, like heated seats in a car. Except nobody told you. You assumed “garden maintenance” involved maintaining the garden, which includes removing the plants you did not invite.

But no. They have decided weeding is not “within scope”. Within scope is mowing what is already flat, trimming what is already visible and leaving your home looking like it hosted a toddler’s birthday party, except the toddler was armed with a leaf blower and a grudge.

And here’s the funny bit, the part that would be funny if it wasn’t your money, they look genuinely surprised when you ask about the weeds. As if you’ve requested they hand-weed the Sahara.

“We don’t do weeding.”

Right. So if a plumber turned up and said, “We don’t do leaks,” we’d all agree he’s in the wrong industry. But gardeners can apparently refuse to deal with actual garden problems and still call it “maintenance”.

It’s not maintenance, mate. It’s a drive-by haircut for grass.

The IT Company That Thinks I’m the Problem

Next up, the IT company. Ah yes, the modern priesthood. They speak in tongues, charge like wounded bulls and when something breaks they look at you like you’ve offended their sacred servers with your unwashed peasant hands.

You call them because a system is failing. Emails aren’t flowing. Domains aren’t verifying. The app is stuck in a digital purgatory of “still propagating” and you’re beginning to think your DNS records have wandered off into the desert for forty years.

They respond with confidence. Not competence, confidence.

“Well it must be on your end.”

Of course it is. It’s always on your end. Because “your end” is a lovely place to point when you don’t want to admit the issue is at their end.

You provide screenshots. Logs. Time stamps. Evidence. A neat little pile of facts that would convince a jury.

They reply with something like, “Have you tried clearing your cache?” which is IT-speak for “We have no idea but we would like you to perform a small ritual to make us feel useful.”

Then, after days of back-and-forth, the truth emerges. It was their system. Their platform. Their verification process. Their glitch. Their “oops”.

Do they apologise? Do they refund? Do they say, “We’re sorry, we blamed you prematurely”?

No. They say something like, “Sometimes the status gets stuck even when everything is working.”

Translation, “Our stuff lies to you and we’re calling that normal.”

Here’s the rub, dear reader, I don’t mind mistakes. I mind arrogance. Mistakes plus humility is fine. Mistakes plus blame-shifting is how you lose customers and earn yourself a reputation as “those clowns”.

The Website That Hides Contact Details Like Nuclear Codes

Then there are companies that talk nonstop about “customer care” while hiding their contact details like it’s the launch code for a submarine.

You click “Contact Us” and it takes you to a page that explains what contact is, and why contact matters and how much they love contact and then offers you a form with twelve mandatory fields including your mother’s maiden name and the emotional trauma you experienced in Year 9.

You fill it in. You press submit. It says, “Thank you. Your request is important to us.”

Then nothing.

You try again. You get a chatbot that says, “Hi! I’m Sunny. How can I help?” Sunny cannot help. Sunny can only ask questions that do not match your problem and then suggest articles titled, “Have You Tried Turning Your Soul Off and On Again?”

At some point you decide you need a phone number. A real one. A number that leads to a person. So you hunt. You scroll. You click tiny footers. You enter help centres. You end up in a labyrinth of FAQs. Sherlock Holmes himself would throw his pipe into the sea and take up fishing.

And when you finally locate a phone number, it rings.

A recorded voice answers.

“We are experiencing higher than normal call volumes.”

Yes. Because you’ve engineered customer service so poorly that customers are now forced to call, repeatedly, like desperate castaways lighting signal fires.

Let me offer a radical theory. Your call volumes are not higher than normal. Your service is lower than normal.

The Optician That Ghosts You Like a Bad Date

Now let’s talk about the optician. This one’s personal, because eyesight is not a luxury item. It’s fairly important when you’d like to read and drive and avoid walking into furniture.

So you leave a message. Polite. Clear. Name, number, reason for calling.

No call back.

You leave another message.

No call back.

You leave a third message and begin to wonder if your voicemail is being used as a training exercise for how to ignore customers.

Eventually you call again and you get someone. They sound surprised you exist, like you’re the first customer they’ve encountered in the wild.

You explain, calmly, that you’ve left three messages.

They say, “Oh we’ve been busy.”

Busy doing what? Not returning calls? Because you seem to be world-class at that.

And again, dear reader, we’re not talking about someone forgetting to add extra sauce to the kebab. We’re talking about medical-adjacent service. If you can’t handle basic call-backs, how are you handling prescriptions and measurements?

“First World Problems” and the Bigger Issue

Now, to be fair, these are first world problems. Nobody is claiming civilisation collapses because the weeds are still there and the IT platform is sulking. But here’s why it matters.

Customer service is not just about convenience. It’s about respect. It’s about the basic moral agreement that if I give you my money, you will do what you said you’d do and if something goes wrong you won’t treat me like an inconvenience for noticing.

A society runs on trust. Businesses run on trust. When “service” becomes “take the money, vanish behind a wall of policy and automation,” trust erodes. People become cynical. They stop giving the benefit of the doubt. They start looking for alternatives, or they stop spending altogether. And then the same businesses that couldn’t be bothered returning calls start wailing about how hard it is to survive.

Which brings us to my favourite modern punchline.

“We Can’t Make a Living” and Other Fairy Tales

After delivering mediocre service and operating like they’re doing you a favour by accepting payment, many of these industries then complain they can’t make a living.

And then, like clockwork, the industry leaders pop up calling for “support”.

Support meaning tax payer money.

Now I’m going to say the quiet part out loud. If your business model depends on government propping you up, while you treat customers like a nuisance, you don’t have a business, you have a lobbying operation.

In a sane world, the market rewards businesses that serve customers well and punishes businesses that don’t. That’s not cruelty, it’s accountability. It’s the grown-up version of cause and effect.

But we’ve drifted into a weird cultural moment where failure is blamed on everyone except the people failing. It’s the customers, it’s the economy, it’s the season, it’s the algorithm, it’s the weather, it’s the vibe, it’s anything except “we’re not doing a good job and we need to lift our game.”

Here is a thought so radical it may require a warning label.

Treat your customers with empathetic respect and you might keep them.

You might even gain more.

I know, it sounds outrageous, like suggesting people should pay their own bills and show up on time.

How Did We Get Here?

Some of it is tech. Automation promised efficiency, but what many companies actually did was replace humans with friction. A chatbot is not “service” if it can’t solve the problem. A form is not “service” if it disappears into a black hole. A “help centre” is not “service” if it’s a maze designed to exhaust you into giving up.

Some of it is culture. We’ve trained people to fear responsibility. Nobody wants to own the problem because owning the problem means being accountable, and accountability has become the corporate version of stepping on Lego.

Some of it is incentives. Many businesses measure staff on call times and ticket closure rates rather than actual resolution. So you get quick calls, closed tickets and unresolved problems, which is like congratulating a fire brigade for responding quickly while the building still burns down.

What Good Service Actually Looks Like

Let me paint a picture of the lost art.

Good service is answering the phone with a human, within a reasonable time.

Good service is calling back when you say you will.

Good service is admitting fault quickly, and fixing it faster.

Good service is not hiding behind policy when common sense is clearly waving at you.

Good service is treating customers as people, not as interruptions.

And here’s the part businesses forget, good service is not “being nice.” It’s being competent and honest. I can handle blunt. I can handle “we can’t do that today.” What I cannot handle is being lied to politely while nothing gets done.

The Radical Plan

So here’s my modest proposal for 2026.

Businesses, stop spending money on marketing slogans about customer care and spend it on actually caring.

Put your contact details where a normal person can find them.

Train staff to solve problems, not to deflect them.

If you mess up, own it, fix it and learn from it.

And if you’re an industry group about to ask for government “support,” try this first, earn support the old-fashioned way, by doing your job well enough that customers voluntarily come back.

Because out here in the real world, people are tired. They’re busy. They’re juggling bills, family, health and life. They don’t need another round of corporate hide-and-seek just to get someone to do what they promised.

Customer service isn’t dead, dear reader. It’s just been buried under “process” and “policy” and “press 2 for disappointment.”

It’s time to dig it up.

Disclaimer: This piece is commentary only and reflects personal opinion. It is not financial, legal, or professional advice.

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Addendum: The Guaranteed Delivery Guarantee That Isn’t

Now let’s add one more chapter to this modern epic of corporate excellence, the major office supply company.

You know the one, big brand, big warehouses and big promises.

You order something basic, not a diamond, not a kidney, just ordinary office supplies. Paper, toner, folders and maybe a new stapler because the old one is held together with faith and a rubber band.

On the checkout page they dangle the magic words: Guaranteed delivery on Thursday.

Guaranteed.

Not “expected,” not “estimated,” not “best efforts,” not “we’ll have a crack,” but guaranteed. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s basically a handshake in text form, a promise, a solemn vow and a sacred oath made in the name of logistics.

So you plan around it. Because that’s what normal people do when someone guarantees something. You think, right, Thursday it is. I’ll be home, I’ll have the office ready, I’ll schedule work that depends on it, I’ll stop improvising like I’m running a pop-up business out of a backpack.

Thursday arrives. The day of destiny. The guaranteed day.

Nothing.

No knock. No parcel. No driver. Not even a “sorry we missed you” card. Which is impressive because they didn’t even show up to miss you.

You check the tracking. It says something vague like “in transit” which in modern shipping language can mean anything from “on a truck” to “still sitting in a warehouse while someone argues over whose job it is to print the label.”

Then comes the cherry on top, the corporate customer service message.

“We are experiencing higher than normal delivery volumes.”

There it is again. The national anthem of mediocrity. Higher than normal volumes. As if customers have collectively decided to buy office supplies purely to sabotage them. As if the company woke up one morning and said, “Crikey, people are ordering from us, what a shock, who could have predicted this?”

Here is my question, if you cannot control the delivery process well enough to reliably hit the date, why are you using the word guaranteed?

Because “guaranteed delivery” is not a marketing flourish. It’s a commitment. It means if you don’t deliver on the guaranteed day you either apologise like you mean it, you refund the freight or you provide compensation that reflects the fact the guarantee was nonsense.

Instead, what happens is you contact them and discover “guaranteed” is actually defined in their internal dictionary as “a general vibe”.

You finally find a human, after navigating a phone tree designed by someone who clearly hates people, and you explain:

“You guaranteed delivery today.”

They respond with the confidence of a trained bureaucrat:

“Yes, it says guaranteed, but delivery timeframes can be affected by factors outside our control.”

Right. So it’s guaranteed, unless it isn’t. Which means it’s not a guarantee, it’s a wish.

A guarantee that dissolves the moment reality shows up is not a guarantee. It’s a slogan.

And then they offer the final insult, the one that makes you want to take up woodwork so you can build your own paper from trees out of sheer spite.

“We can deliver tomorrow.”

Tomorrow.

Brilliant. Thank you for offering me the thing you should have done today when you guaranteed you’d do it today.

And you can almost hear the unspoken message behind it: “What do you want us to do about it?”

What do I want? I want words to mean things again. I want a company to take responsibility when it fails. I want the word guaranteed to be reserved for situations where someone is willing to stand behind the promise.

Because the real issue is not the late box of paper. The real issue is the casual dishonesty baked into the system.

If you can’t guarantee Thursday, say “estimated Thursday.”

If you can’t control your couriers, stop pretending you can.

If you miss the promise, own it, apologise and make it right.

Otherwise, stop calling it customer service. Call it what it is, customer management. Herd them through a maze, throw in some buzzwords and hope they get tired and give up.

And then, when you wonder why customers are cranky and call volumes are “higher than normal,” maybe remember, you promised Thursday.

And then you didn’t show.

That’s not logistics, that’s theatre.