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Comment by keepitsimplem8 | Hacker News Reader

"data shows that over 30 per cent of people would pay more for a product or service if they received exceptional customer care."

The solid majority wins.

Airlines take a lot of heat for poor customer service, but most customers will purchase the cheapest possible ticket no matter what.

Be the change you want to see in the world...if all customers collectively decided to do business only with companies that provided excellent customer service...then excellent customer service would become ubiquitous outside of large monopolies and government agencies.

In other words...it's only a problem if you consider it a problem that people in general want the best of everything, but for cheap or free. I don't.

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This is similar to the problem of security: you don't know you're not getting good customer service until it's too late.

> data shows that over 30 per cent of people would pay more for a product or service if …

« Would » or « do » ? Lot’s of people say they would pay for lot of thing « if only … », but ultimately act differently when it’s time to pull out the credit card.

Airlines have long realized that there are generally two groups of customers: the occasional flyer that will always choose the cheapest flight, regardless of customer service; and the regular flyer that takes service, comfort, reliability, and other things into account. That's why they have frequent flyer programs where the service level goes up as you fly more with the same airlines, from expedited checkin, free food and drinks, free upgrades, and free flights.

Customer service costs money - why bother spending it on a customer who doesn't care about the difference?

> Airlines take a lot of heat for poor customer service, but most customers will purchase the cheapest possible ticket no matter what.

When I fly these days, all of biz/first class is full. I'm starting to think they need more higher end seats.

Airlines fill those seats by upgrading people with status or miles.

And that's why you need government intervention: enforce a minimum standard of quality, so that all companies have to invest at least a common baseload of money and can't undercut each other by "saving" on support.

"Paying more for exceptional customer care," translates to, "Higher pay and better training for customer care workers." Ask if people support a higher minimum wage, or a higher wage for customer service workers, watch that 30% plummet. People are more spiteful of "unskilled workers" being paid well than they are desirous of better service.

Do we actually need that? As parent commenter said, you can buy something cheap or you can pay more get good support. Your choice. If the government intervened, nobody would have the option anymore, the "expensive with good support" would be chosen for you (and that's a best-case scenario).

The government can just as easily rate the service instead of shutting anything down.

If your country has any consumer protection body, it already has all the data it need to rate them.

Complain to your city manager, state legislator, or representative when you get bad customer service from a government agency. They work for you. You don't have to put up with it.

What are you going to do, take your business to a competing agency? “We don’t care, we don’t have to.”

Vote in a replacement to the person you complained to, and tell the newspaper that this person is not doing their job. These people are highly motivated to resolve complaints and have people in their offices dedicated to handling them. How do I know? I've dealt with them. If everyone else also knew how to use their government, I wouldn't have had to be the one making the complaints because the problems would have already been resolved.

The funny thing is that these days, people are paying more (thanks to inflation) for products and services while customer care is getting worse.

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