I guess my original post wasn't worded exactly right. I wasn't talking about repairs, my interest was the whole experience. When you asked a question, did you get the correct answer? How long did it take to get a response? If you talked to someone were they courteous or did they act like you were a pain? When you go to the web-site was it easy to navigate? If you call were you put on hold forever? When you order something was the order taken OK?, did it take forever to get it? Along with the repair and or parts issue, these are the things that I wonder if anybody thinks about or has bad customer service just become the norm and it's what we expect. BTW I've never had an issue with RS, because I refuse to patronize their stores. Enough said?
When just dealing with businesses as a whole... I'm buying materials, parts... all kinds of stuff each week. And I'm always looking for new people to deal with, new materials/parts to work with, better ways to do things and so on... In this supposed terrible economy that everybody keeps talking about, I am constantly amazed at the terrible business practices that most places have. On sites where they come right out and tell you to "feel free to contact us"... you can contact them and ask about a material or product... tell them you're a business... never even say how much you might order... and on average you will get a response maybe 10% of the time. The rest completely ignored. They could be looking at thousands of dollars of materials sold for all they know, but no response. Or if you do actually talk to someone, they give you some primitive little answer that you get the impression somebody typed it out with one had while they were eating their lunch or something.
I just bought a piece of tooling off an eBay biz the other day... Two questions before I purchased went unanswered. After I did buy it, I tried two more times with the same question... both went unanswered. Finally they emailed me a question of their own and acted like I never sent the other emails.
I sent a big order to a gov distributor the other day. These people were so messed up it was almost laughable. I had to talk to them like 10 times before they finally figured out what was going on. They asked for an invoice 4 separate times, even though the box had one right in there, and I emailed copies the other times as well. And each time they had a problem, I would call them at various times of the day, and their phone just said they were at lunch, so "call back". And of course any email I sent went unanswered. And this isn't one guy working out of his house... This is a huge biz.
I could go on and on, but in my experience, that's the overall treatment you get from a majority of biz's out there, and I honestly have no idea how they continue to exist.