It’s easy to sit here aghast at the big, attention-getting customer service missteps that have recently blown up into public relation nightmares for United Airlines and American Airlines. These issues aren’t limited to airlines, however. During the past few years, companies in the automotive, life sciences, restaurant, energy, and healthcare sectors have also dealt with extremely negative PR fallout for any number of shady practices that harmed or even killed their customers.

What’s going on? Has quality at these customer-facing companies fallen so far and so fast that these humongous failures are now part of our daily lives?

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