Customer experience enshittification. A must read book !

Enshittification, the shitification is underway. Can we react, now that we have accepted to become addicted, and in any other way than with Luigi Mangione's method? Enshittification, what are we talking about?

Many platforms and companies, which have managed to become indispensable and well-known in their field, are gradually degrading their service and the quality of the customer, visitor and patient experience they offer, or increasing the cost and usage. Is this new, avoidable, are books on the subject sufficient and are there appropriate responses to resist it?

This week, hoteliers, accompanied by law firms, decided to take legal action against Booking.com.

Cory Doctorow's book will be released in October 2025. 

At the end of 2024, in New York, an American chose another, more radical option. The death penalty is being sought for him: Luigi Mangione turned to crime because he felt that the service he was paying for, in this case health insurance, was not being provided. The young, educated man murdered the CEO of UnitedHealth Group in Manhattan.

Is this deterioration organised, intentional and widespread? Canadian journalist Cory Doctorow, French researcher Mathilde Abel and French customer experience specialist Manuel Jacquinet share their views on the reasons behind the deterioration of service or customer experience in companies that had made it one of their hallmarks, whether American or French. 

Current situation: the quality of the user and customer experience is deteriorating
The arrival of ‘Meta AI’ in WhatsApp is one of the latest examples of the ‘dumbing down’ of digital interfaces, which unnecessarily complicates a service with unwanted options. ‘I'd rather die than use this,’ railed a Guardian columnist on 6 April after discovering the tool in WhatsApp.

In 2021, BNP Paribas launched a service called Affinité, which allows customers to have a personal advisor they can contact. The service costs £12 per month. In short, the opportunity for BNP customers to speak to someone who knows a little about their account has become a paid option.

At Ikea, the poor quality of deliveries and the unavailability of customer service have become memorable, leading to the creation of the hashtag: Ikea Fucked my life. 

The list goes on.

‘Merdification’ is an inexorable process of deterioration in the quality of services on digital platforms. Canadian journalist Cory Doctorow conceptualised this change with the term ‘Enshittification’, first used on Twitter in 2022.  Everyone can experience, in their daily lives, the deterioration of service, the increasing complexity of even the simplest internet search, and the failure to deliver on commercial promises. The fluidity of customer journeys and the accessibility of platforms or certain airlines are increasingly deteriorating, leading to numerous posts and complaints, particularly on social media. 

"The story of a concept. In what now seems like a distant past, no “sponsored” results appeared at the top of Google search results. It was possible to quickly find a specific user or content on Instagram thanks to a clever hashtag system. Videos posted on YouTube were not preceded or interrupted by any advertisements. Any Netflix subscriber could give their account password to their friends and family and watch a film with them at the same time. Better still, internet users using a flight comparison site such as Skyscanner could book a flight without seeing the price increase randomly at each stage of the booking process.

Although this deterioration in the quality of services provided by digital platforms has long gone unnoticed by the media, every user has experienced it. All that was missing was a word to describe this seemingly inexorable process of platform ‘rot’.

Sebmil, the nickname of an internet user, shares his point of view in a comment on an article already published on the subject:

"Although I agree that the impact is enormous on platforms, I find it simplistic to emphasise this in the generic definition of the term.
From my own observation, “crapification” is increasingly present at all levels, including in physical products:
* Shortened lifespan to sell new models regularly, when the product is not basically designed to be disposable
* Products linked to a mandatory service (e.g. products that do not work without the manufacturer's cloud, or even stop working when the cloud protocol changes, lose functionality after a certain period of time, etc.)

* Product deliberately made complex to discourage repair or sell services (automobiles, household appliances).
All of this is driven by economic logic to the detriment of consumers (the term takes on its full meaning here) and the environment.
After all, we all have our share of responsibility in this. As Coluche said: ‘When you think that all we have to do is stop buying for it to stop selling!’ (even if it's difficult to get most people to understand this).

What is surprising
Two things are surprising but can be explained in part: customers remain loyal to these brands and continue to use them.

What is the economic interest in this phenomenon? The customer and user experience in shops and on Anglo-Saxon platforms that have become indispensable in our lives (Airbnb, Booking, Facebook) is deteriorating every day, even though all experts agree that the quality of UX and CX are key to repeat business and customer loyalty. And yet many consultants and agencies offer improvement and audit services in this area. Why? The answer is not new: predation. 

The lure of profit, once you've become indispensable. A three-step process. 
Digital platforms are unique companies that specialise in matching, i.e. connecting supply and demand on a (more or less) large scale: for example, between a private hire driver and someone who needs a ride; between a videographer and a viewer; between a buyer and a seller. ‘They are professionals in network effects – that is, the ability to attract very different audiences and make them interdependent,’ explains Mathilde Abel.

These platforms now have at their disposal, thanks in particular to their users' data, numerous tools for measuring the impact of service degradation on their margins. As a result, ‘these companies exercise their monopoly in a very specific way, because they are able to play on price levels with their competitors, but also on cross-price levels between their different markets,’ explains Mathilde Abel. The ability of platforms to discriminate on price and degrade their service has always been an integral part of their business model."

At Amazon, the marketplace once offered a service that became indispensable in B2B: subscribing to FBA, the outsourced logistics service that allows merchants to have their products listed on Amazon Prime, thereby improving their search engine ranking. The platform changed its practice and then reverted back to it.  

In order to reach shoppers, many sellers also opt for their products to be eligible for Amazon Prime, as this boosts their ranking in Amazon’s search engine. The main way for sellers to attain eligibility is to subscribe to Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) in order to get their products shipped. FBA is a part of Amazon’s supply chain solutions, and allows sellers to outsource all shipping logistics to the company. 

Amazon  “temporarily relaxed its coercive conduct” in 2018 and did not require sellers to use FBA in order to become Prime eligible. The complaint states that this decision was “immediately popular with both shoppers and sellers,” but that the company soon realized it would create “competition that would threaten Amazon’s monopoly power.” (source: Vice.com) 

They therefore proceed in three stages, as described by Cory Doctorow in his book*:

When they are first launched, platforms need to attract users and therefore seek to make themselves particularly useful to them, even if it means offering a service at a loss. They then seek to attract corporate customers (sellers, advertisers or media) and therefore gear the platform's operation in their favour, at the expense of users. Finally, once everyone has become dependent on the platform, various mechanisms are used to redirect the value produced away from users or corporate customers and towards the platform itself and its shareholders.

Is this deterioration widespread, an American disease?  
A third, equally interesting question arises: does this deterioration in service also affect companies and platforms that are popular in France? In an informative article in Le Monde, researcher Mathilde Abel (a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research in Economics and Statistics at the National School of Statistics and Economic Administration) offers a detailed perspective:

‘Shitification’ is undeniably a movement inherent to platforms, but it is not practised uniformly everywhere. ‘These differences are not only related to questions of economic rationality: they result from governance choices at the company level, concerning how the platform exercises its market power,’ explains the economist.