Customer service is all but dead, and not just with the airline industry. I dread ever having to deal with a company outside of basic transactions.

I used to think this was due to some sort of societal shift towards being people being more dick-ish and self-absorbed, but now I think it is just a case of efficiency run amok.

In order for companies to be efficient they define very narrow roles for employees, define a narrow set of likely interactions, and train only for dealing with those and then eventually base performance metrics off of only that narrowly defined set of predefined actions. When something even slightly out of the ordinary occurs, nobody is incentivized or authorized to take steps off the playbook to make things right. So you end up with massive gridlock where the employees can't really help you so they stall and redirect, which is probably almost as frustrating for them (I'm assuming here, I don't work in customer service) as it is for us.

Even the modern companies lauded for their great customer service like Amazon or Apple pretty much fit into this "pre-defined interactions" model but side-step some of the bigger problems by just having a very liberal "okay, we'll swap it for you with no questions asked" policy, which is still just a mostly automatic process and in some cases doesn't actually fix the real problems, but at least it is a policy under which the customer makes out better than in the usual case of being sent on a wild-goose chase of contacts only to eventually smash into a brick wall.