Why Customer Service Is Broken - And Who's Paying the Price | Dr. Diane Negra explains

We are delighted to welcome Dr. Diane Negra, Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin and a distinguished Member of the Royal Irish Academy, to Business Talk. In this episode, Dr. Negra joins us to discuss her thought-provoking book, I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The New Cultures of Customer Service, offering a critical lens on how customer service has evolved as a cultural and organizational phenomenon in contemporary society. In this illuminating episode of Business Talk, Dr. Diane Negra draws on her book I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The New Cultures of Customer Service (Stanford University Press, 2026) to examine how the relationship between customers and service providers has fundamentally broken down in the age of digital capitalism. She argues that the "frustrated and poorly served customer" has become the defining cultural archetype of our times, replacing older figures like the Organization Man or the Ideal Housewife, as antagonism between customers and service workers spreads across industries from airports and banks to universities and retail. Central to her argument is the deceptive language of "convenience": corporations quietly shift labor onto customers through self-service checkouts, complex digital platforms, and mandatory app-based interactions, while training staff to mask absent services with relentless corporate cheerfulness. Dr. Negra further reveals how media representations, class stratification, what she calls the "velvet rope economy", and the stigmatization of complaint, particularly for women, have normalized an erosion of dignity that she links to ambient social anger, loneliness, and disaffiliation from the collective. Rather than accepting these experiences as trivial personal frustrations, she calls on individuals and policymakers alike to recognize poor customer service as a structural problem at the heart of 21st-century capitalism, one that demands both personal resistance and political action. This podcast is brought to you by Global Management Consultancy. Disclaimer: 1. The background music incorporated in this video is the intellectual property of its respective developer and is protected under applicable copyright laws. Notwithstanding that it is a free-to-use version, Business Talk, Global Management Consultancy, and Deepak Bhatt do not own, and expressly do not claim, any rights, title, or interest in or to this music. 2. Dr. Diane Negra shared key insights from her book, “I'm Sorry You Feel That Way: The New Cultures of Customer Service”, in an engaging episode of the Business Talk podcast. The uploaded video contains copyrighted content, so changing any graphics, music, or on-screen appearance of the author or host is not allowed.