What’s happened to American customer service? A decade ago there were hundreds of UK companies sending their customer service departments across the Atlantic to float around theme parks, hotels, retail outlets and restaurants just to see how it’s done. There was a worldwide consensus that the US had cracked this customer service mallarky, so the rest of the world paid a visit and learned a lot

But I’ll tell you something, those days are gone. A visiting customer service department could pick up some really bad habits if they repeated the process in 2008

I’ve been visiting the US regularly for the last ten years, and I’ve been to a fair few places. New York (the city and the wider state), Vegas, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Florida, all around New England, and a few places in Nevada and Arizona. So I’d argue that the sample from which my observations are drawn is reasonably broad. My main point being that the national obsession with customer service has more or less disintegrated. I’ve just returned from a break in Boston, so I’ll give some recent examples to illustrate the point

First, the journey over. My flight was booked through KLM, but I did notice it was a code share with NWA. I had hoped that the carrier would be KLM, but unfortunately it was not. Consequently myself and the other passengers had to put up with a crabby, short-tempered NWA cabin crew who gave short-shrift to many quite reasonable (to my ears at least) passenger queries and occasionally bickered quite openly with one another in the aisle. At one point it sounded like the gentleman behind me had somehow got his coffee poured all over his lap if the stewards words “It was your own fault, you moved your cup” were anything to go by. Hey, even if that was true, is it really so helpful to point it out? Scolded as well as scalded, what a combination

Was it lack of sleep? Were they demoralised for some reason? Who knows? Things were clearly not right, and the resulting level of service just seemed so unprofessional on both outbound and inbound journeys

So we arrive in Boston Logan and first off encountered a surprising little oasis of civility at passport control. In exactly the place you ‘d expect icy glares and barked requests, you actually get a smile and an occasional joke. Maybe it was my passport photograph, it has happened before. Baggage collection was another matter. The airport was not at all busy but we had a long, long wait (after passport control) before anything happened on the belts. Was it always like this? Possibly. On my travels in 2008 I’ve been through Dubai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Schipol, Charles de Gaulle, Heathrow and Karachi and the waiting time for baggage at Boston Logan was the longest
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