Nothing to do with audio, but my 'award' for customer service goes to my local chemist's shop.  I've got a bum knee and can only walk using a stick at the moment, and even then not awfully far.  Since my wife passed away I have no means of transport, her being the only driver.  My local pharmacist has arranged for my monthly prescription (I'm on 23 tablets/day including painkillers)  to be delivered to me, either by his wife, or another very nice lady who works in the shop.  Obviously, I'm not a special case, they provide this service to other people who are "stuck" too, including my 93-year-old mum.  There is no charge for this, and being an old git I don't even pay for my prescriptions any more.  Without it, I'd have a lot of faffing around plus cab fares once a month.  That, to me, is great customer service.  I doubt you'd catch Boots doing it, or any of the big supermarkets that also house pharmacies.

Good on him.
Our local pharmacy is so bad I decided to risk Pharmacy2U.
Impressive and likely to put a lot of pharmacies out of business.

I had a few too many prospective punters come to us with their problems when I ran my printing company.
Spent too long giving free advice with some explaining what they needed to do to make files ready, formatting, true type fonts, embedding fonts, always PDF rather than Word or Excel if you can. Others I forget.

Eventually I learned to be tentative helping them, spending less time sorting them out as too many lost the will.
With a small number I had to say "we can't help you" as they were nowhere near the point and impossible to help.

Classic was a multinational Pharmaceutical company who refused to embed their fonts on regulatory documents - new drugs for submission to drug agencies. Legal documents that could have life threatening consequences.
If fonts were not embedded then the big printer will substitute (!)
Dealing with all sorts of fonts, including scientific meant data and documents were changed.
I saw one real example with an alpha changed to a colon - scary.
They went to another printer who substituted fonts. Easy fix.
Lost a big turnover there for a clean conscience.

“Hi-fi” may have been more of a way of life back in the 60s and 70s, when the only things you could own was a house, a car, a TV, and an audio system of some description. Nowadays, there’s more stuff we can buy to waste our time than we can humanly afford. Nowadays it is one of those hobbies that people rarely talk about, enjoyed by the few. Those wishing to buy a decent audio system are becoming more scarce as years go on, and when the current 40-60 year age group has departed this earth, how long will “hi-fi” have?

Over the last 20 years, footfall has decreased for a number of reasons. I do feel that one of those reasons are the small number of condescending dealers who look down their noses at anyone who walks through he door - except for regulars - pushing the impression that our industry is a very cliquey group that dislike outsiders and treats those who have no clue what they’re talking about as idiots. You could even trace this behaviour as far back as the infamous Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch...

Having worked at a few places previously, I know what the attitudes are like when the example in the first post walks in. This is one of those perfect opportunity to repair the image of this industry has created for itself, but most treat it as some time waster taking the pee. If we were living in the 80s, we can afford to do that, but the reality is that we’re currently reaping what we have sown. I appreciate that that may well not have been the fault of those dealers who have stuck with traditional methods of dealing with people face to face, spending the time getting to know them, building a relationship with them, but that’s the way it is.

High quality dealers out there have a choice of whether to join the masses in their social media spamming and faceless transactions, or do things differently, and show that there are dealers out there that have a sociable manner, and are approachable. Social media is a strong tool, even if you don’t use it, as helping someone out with something for 10 minutes may well get you a mention somewhere, and from that, you may get some extra followers, a sale or two, and some new customers for life. They may well do the same thing, with the possibility of things growing exponentially.

Can the better dealers in this industry turn things round and change the impression most people have about it? We can buy try.

The problem is, higher quality dealers are on a faster downward slope than boxshifters, through no fault of their own. People are now growing up with the likes of Amazon, who have made next day delivery the norm for literally anything you care to buy online, so people expect things in stock, and expect them to be delivered tomorrow, if ordered within office hours. But people will wait months for a three-piece suite, or a weeks for a new bathroom or kitchen, or even a car, but electronics they want now, otherwise they can go online and order something to be with them tomorrow. 

Boxshifters are trying to move with the times, to keep up (can they?), supply demand. This is more in line with the Amazon way of life, so is more of a norm, more acceptable to more people. 

I think from that that you can see which I think will prevail. 

The profit margin for the likes of Apple isn’t there for hi-fi dealers - which I heard was about 10%, much like games consoles (dealers have to earn money other ways with packages and/or contracts, in the case of phones. Who would seek out a hi-fi dealer for an iPad anyway? Most will go to an Apple store or John Lewis. Amazon is the modern day Argos catalogue.

No, that is straightforward to do from home for most brands, so shouldn't need to be done at a dealers IMHO.

Back to car dealerships, you'd think the same thing about upgrading car firmware and yet when I asked earlier in the month they looked at me blankly as if to say "you want to do what, now?"

I then proceeded to explain that the useless good-for-nothing Subaru entertainment centre could not run a single UK app (like, for instance, Waze) and I wanted it to be upgraded because Subaru, like all the car manufacturers, lock up firmware upgrades behind dealer logins in case we dare to try it ourselves.  Frankly, I'm a lot less likely to f*ck it up than a dealer.

but alas, not Cyrus..

There is a British problem in that people are not prepared to pay for quality. I don't see this as evident in other countries like Germany.