Retraction - I Wasn't Talking About All Customer Service Reps

I just had a conversation with my wife, who worked in a CSR role for several years, and boy! did I ever get a talking to! I listened and realized that what I just wrote was grossly unfair to a very large swath of employees in companies that I really did not intend to target with my rant.

I want to be clear about the fact that I am not talking about customer service roles in large organizations in which the working conditions are extremely poor, or jobs where you are taking hundreds of calls a day from random, one-off strangers, or where you as the CSR have no discretion or latitude. That was not what I was talking about at all.

I am talking about a professional, or semi-professional type of job, like the broker at my insurance company has, where there is a certain degree of latitude, a living wage is paid, there aren't hundreds of calls a day and the customers are not random strangers, but people that one can reasonably expect to interact with more than once. It is these types of employees who do not perform their jobs with care that I take issue with.

Just wanted to be very clear, because I don't want to attack people who are basically defenseless. That's not fair.