>German companies are awful at customer service. Even within the EU

one would have to reconsider a century of stereotypes if they weren't.

>German companies are awful at customer service.

True also from my experience. I've noted several potential reasons why that is from my time in Germany.

Government provided customer protection laws are quite lax and disputes tricky to win and don't represent a big enough deterrent for the scammers when they're just a slap on the wrist and therefore part of the cost of doing business. Sure, you can get sued and you loose once, but if 80 of the 100 customers you scammed don't sue you or don't win, then you're still at a net positive and therefore it's profitable to keep doing that.

Also that Germany doesn't have common law, so lawsuits aren't arbitrated based on precedent, so customers who got screwed need to sue and win individually for the same issue which is favorable for the companies doing the screwing as without the precedent of common law that minimizes their risk of loosing by slam dunk every time. Also, some German judges art just tech illiterate boomers who will throw out a case they don't even understand unless you're Axel Springer.

(some) Rental agreements, internet, telco and gym memberships are my favorite infamous examples. They're almost universally regarded as anti-consumer, with tonnes of sketchy clauses, but German lawmakers do nothing to improve that for the consumer.

Secondly, Germans aren't used to being very demanding and lighting a brand on fire on social media the way Americans/Anglophones do on Twitter when they don't like something, partly because of cultural reasons where making a fuss in public is discouraged/shamed, partly because of legal reasons where a company can sue your or at least send you scary legal letters for libel if you damage their brand online like that in Germany. Or at lest, the company can simply demand the social media platform take down the offending posts, and by German law they have to comply which the likes of Google/Meta will comply automatically without any arbitration.

Also, culturally, the conservative Germans seem to have have gaslit themselves into believing everything "Made in Germany" is perfect without fault, while everything made abroad is of poor quality or at least worthy of scrutiny, so they just default to using German products without looking across the fence to check out the foreign competition. This way of thinking is more typical of manufactured goods but not sure how much it applies to SW products and services.

Couple these with the difficulty of starting and scaling a business in Germany as a small entrepreneur and with the legal and bureaucratic hoops designed to keep foreign competitors out, mean that German companies operating in Germany who became established players, have litte incentive to improve beyond the bare minimum, so they can keep providing poor quality services while still staying in business. It's classic of an economy of well connected dinosaurs sitting on old money.