American Customers Are Madder Than Ever
It has never been easier to buy stuff. But dealing with product and service problems has never felt so difficult, consumers say.
Seventy-seven percent of customers reported a product or service problem in the past year, a new high compared with 74% in 2023, according to the National Customer Rage Survey.
Sixty-eight percent of consumers found complaining to companies required high or very high effort, up from 65% in 2023.
Consumer perceptions of customer experience have declined for four consecutive years, with an average score of 68.3 out of 100 in June, according to Forrester research.
Guests were sent scrambling on Nov. 9 when the hotel-and-apartment rental company Sonder abruptly shut down during their stays. Their keycards suddenly stopped working, locking some customers out with their belongings still inside. And when they sought help from Sonder workers and loyalty-program representatives at Marriott, which had been offering Sonder rooms under a licensing deal, they discovered that they were sometimes breaking the news.
It was just another day for U.S. consumers.
Seventy-seven percent of customers reported experiencing a product or service problem in the previous 12 months, according to the latest National Customer Rage Survey, conducted in February.
That was a new high, surpassing 74% in 2023, when the study was last conducted, and 66% during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Only 32% told researchers they had experienced a problem in 1976, when a similar version of the study was first conducted.
Other studies have reached similar conclusions.
The Customer Experience and Communications Consumer Insights survey showed seventy-one percent of U.S. and Canadian respondents think most companies need to improve their customer experience, a record high, according to the seventh annual study conducted in August and published in November by fintech company Broadridge Financial Solutions.
And the research and advisory firm Forrester in June found that U.S. and Canadian consumer perceptions of the customer experience have dropped for a fourth consecutive year, with brands’ average score reaching a record low of 68.3 out of 100. The index reflects consumers’ attitudes across six metrics, including how easy a brand is to deal with and how interacting with the brand feels.
People are partly upset over their feeling that it is much easier to buy products and services than it is to get help when there is a problem, according to Scott Broetzmann, the president and chief executive of Customer Care Measurement & Consulting, which conducts the National Customer Rage Survey with the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
Sixty-eight percent said their recent experiences with complaining to companies required high or very high amounts of effort, up from 65% in 2023, the study found. Respondents’ top two frustrations were long messages to endure before speaking with a representative and trying to figure out how to contact a company.
“I can order dental floss and it’ll be at my doorstep in 30 minutes, but when it comes to problem-handling, it’s still an effortful, frustrating, emotionally stressful” experience, Broetzmann said.
That dynamic extends to the subscription models proliferating everywhere. The Federal Trade Commission under the Biden administration tried to force companies to make it as easy to cancel memberships as it is to sign up. But a federal appeals court nullified the so-called click-to-cancel rule, ruling that the FTC didn’t follow proper procedures during the rule-making process.
Retailers from Saks Fifth Avenue to Abercrombie & Fitch have also been fighting a rising tide of returns with measures like return fees and shorter return windows, annoying some customers.
Many companies now are turning to artificial intelligence to field complaints, steering customers to online chatbots before they can reach human staff. Companies say the technology helps solve simple problems faster and lets representatives spend more time working on more complex issues. But most National Rage Survey respondents gave AI chatbots ambiguous or modestly unfavorable ratings as tools for complaints.
It also found that consumers who identified as upper class are nearly twice as satisfied with resolution outcomes compared with those in the middle, working, and lower classes. More companies in recent years have taken to stratifying their customer service, providing those who pay for higher-tier memberships with special phone lines and direct access to customer support.
Some companies do offer service or an experience that seems to resonate with consumers in a good way. Chewy, a pet supplies retailer, topped Forrester’s Customer Experience Index for a fourth year in a row, with a score of 80.3 out of 100.
But the overall trend is downward. Seven percent of the 469 brands Forrester studied improved their score by a statistically significant amount from 2024 in the U.S. and Canada, compared with 25% whose scores fell.
“Like the proverbial frog that doesn’t feel the water becoming increasingly hotter, many North American brands are inching into more treacherous positions with their customers’ loyalty,” Forrester Principal Analyst Pete Jacques wrote in the report.