The Gen Z Stare: Why customer service feels colder than ever

A new hot online debate is called the Gen Z Stare. Recently, on the platform X, older generations complained about the lousy customer service they are receiving nowadays, mainly from the younger generations. X user @pbprot shared a post that gained more than 1.7 million views and started a firestorm of back-and-forth opinions.

The post from the user reads, “I’m so sick of the new style of customer service where people just stare at you when you walk up to the counter/service desk that the car service guy saying ‘good morning, I’ll be with you in a minute’ immediately made me start thinking ‘wow, THIS is how you run a business.’”

What's Happening?

As a society, we are now relationship disadvantaged. A 2024 study found that 40% of adults have gone three or more days without a single face-to-face conversation. This suggests many people today may have fewer than one in-person interaction per day.

The so-called friendship recession describes a long-term trend: Between 1990 and 2021, the share of people with 10-plus close friends dropped from 33% to 13%. Fewer close social ties likely mean fewer daily interactions. Teen habits also changed dramatically: Whereas teens in the 1990s typically hung out in person regularly, only about 25% of teens today spend time with friends outside school daily.

Detailed time-use surveys from decades ago suggest people spent one to three hours per day in social interaction, often face-to-face. Several of those interactions were likely meaningful. Today, many people fall well below that once-common daily social threshold; some even go days without a real conversation.

Research underscores that face-to-face interactions are more vital for mental health and well-being than texting, calling, or meeting via Zoom. Many psychologists argue that we’ve lost valuable in-person social time compared to previous generations.

Americans today spend far less time interacting face-to-face than 30 years ago. Time use surveys reveal a steep drop in in-person social time. For example, weekly hours spent with friends plummeted from about 6.5 hours per week a decade or two ago to only 2 hours and 45 minutes per week by 2021. This represents well over a 50% decline in friend interactions. American adults in the early 2020s spend roughly 30% less time on face-to-face socializing than they did 20 years earlier.

The change is even more dramatic for young people: Teenagers’ in-person social time fell by almost 50% in the same period. One national analysis found that daily socializing with friends dropped from about 60 minutes per day in 2003 to just 20 minutes per day in 2020. Consistently, the average American now spends more time alone, about 5.5 hours per day, up from 4.75 hours in 2003. In short, face-to-face interactions have steadily declined in frequency and duration since the 1990s.

Long-Term Trends

The General Social Survey shows the share of Americans frequently socializing with neighbors fell from 44% in the 1970s to 28% by 2022. Over the same period, 46% of Americans once said that others could be trusted, and only 26% of Americans say the same today.

In the early 2010s, 44% of Americans reported spending social time in the evening with neighbors several times per month. In 2022, 28% made it a priority to spend some of their evenings with other people each month.

Social Displacement

For adults, too, digital communication often replaces or interrupts face-to-face conversations. Many Americans now default to texting or social media to catch up with friends, reducing the need for in- person visits. Social media use has skyrocketed, and some studies find that heavy social media users have fewer in-person interactions and feel more socially isolated. In short, technology has made it easier to stay connected remotely, but this convenience appears to have come at the cost of less frequent physical togetherness.

In the 1990s and even 2000s, most people worked on-site, generating daily in-person contact with colleagues and customers. Today, a much larger workforce works from home, meaning fewer daily face-to-face encounters during the workday. This shift translates to millions of Americans no longer chatting with co-workers at the office or meeting clients in person each day. Casual workplace conversations, lunch meetups, and Keurig conversations, once regular parts of daily life, have been reduced for those working from home.

Soft Skills

Service aptitude skills do not apply to the technical or operational side of the experience. However, they are among the most critical parts of an organization’s customer experience. The quality of your customer service and your organization’s customer- service level comes down to one thing and one thing only: the average service aptitude of every employee you have.

Service aptitude is a person’s ability to recognize opportunities to meet and exceed customers’ expectations, regardless of the circumstances. It represents the hospitality side only. This means how an employee makes another person feel. To be a company that consistently delivers outstanding customer service to all, these characteristics need to be screened for in the interview process. Soft skills should be a mandatory part of your new employee training and constantly revisited with your existing employees.

While these skills seem like basic expectations of individuals in the workforce, one study showed that nearly 60% of leaders in the U.S. believe it’s difficult to find candidates with soft skills. That is why it is the burden of companies and the training they provide to develop these constantly.

John DiJulius III, author of The Customer Service Revolution, is president of The DiJulius Group, a customer service consulting firm that works with companies such as Starbucks, Chick-fil-A, Ritz-Carlton, Nestle, PwC, Lexus, and many more. Contact him at 216-839-1430 or info@thedijuliusgroup.com.