What is happening to the quality of customer service?

Why the quality of customer service is in decline? Why the customer service staff is not knowledgeable? Why when you send an e-mail inquiry, all you get back is a reference to a website where you have to dig for information? Why customer service is not personal anymore?

I have been traveling for the last seven months and throughout my traveling I had to deal with customer service staff in various organizations. My overall impression was: companies are putting speed before quality; they care about quantity more than they care about quality.

A person my think; because of the rapid spread of technology and the ease of spreading knowledge, companies would spend more time in educating their customer service staff, but it seems like most companies are caught in a fierce competition that they are focusing more about quantity than quality.
This trend of focusing on quantity more than quality is not something new, at least not for me. Around 1996, I was working as customer service representative for one of the biggest computer manufacturer in the US. Working there, I was openly told to take more calls than to solve customer issues. In our training, we were trained on how to get the customer of the phone regardless if we solved his/her issue or not, as long as the customer was satisfied and was giving the impression that the issue was resolved. Needless to say this policy didn’t work for long and the company ended up closing the call center after so many complaints from the customers. That was not the only job where I had this experience and the results were always the same: giving the customer the impression that he/she is getting a good service while not actually helping them will always come back to hunt you.