Customer service is dead, and it’s older people paying the price

There was something very noticeable about my fellow passengers when I travelled by train to Wales, Newcastle and other points north in the past few months.

Most of them were younger than me. It must be the lure of student railcards, I thought. Or perhaps train travel reflects their green credentials, rejecting cars because of their impact on the planet. But now I realise the issue was not so much the number of young people, but a lack of older ones.

For it is becoming apparent that the young have a heads-up when it comes to train tickets – and for that matter, all kinds of purchases.

To them, buying something online is as easy as handing over a fiver used to be for their grandparents. And while they find all manner of cheap ticket deals, elderly people and others who either don’t like or don’t have recourse to mobiles, tablets and laptops get charged far more.

Research by consumer group Which? shows that same-day train tickets were 52 per cent more expensive on average at stations. The best value fares were either unavailable or you needed to be a code-cracker to uncover them. If you found the station’s ticket machines to be confusing or not working, forget it. Less than 300 out of 1,766 railway stations have a full- time manned ticket office.

This favouring of the tech-savvy is happening everywhere, with those who cannot cope with the latest gadget at a distinct disadvantage.

We now live in what can only be described as an ageist society. It’s happening everywhere. If you can’t cope with the train ticketing maze, and opt instead to take your car, it is quite likely that when you park, you will be required to pay with a parking app on a mobile.

The age of the app is matched in all its alienating force by the era of the QR code, which is fast taking over pubs, bars and restaurants.

Who wants to spend their time on a romantic restaurant date, hovering their phone over an indecipherable QR squiggle – even if you do have a phone? It makes one pine for the days of ineffectual waitresses, immortalised by Julie Waters in the Two Soups sketch, and grumpy waiters imported direct from Parisian bistros.

For at least grumpy means human interaction. We had enough of being cut off from it during the Covid lockdown years.

While most of us emerged from that period longing for the chit-chat of a shopping queue, most businesses seemed to think that the pandemic was an opportunity to create some kind of tech-enabled utopia, where the world was cashless, online and robotic. They have tried to impose it ever since in the name of efficiency, time-saving and profit.

Quite how much most of us dislike this kind of world, I believe in part explains the outrage over the Post Office Horizon scandal, dramatised on ITV.

For the majority of people, postmasters and postmistresses represented what we want from businesses: the human touch, people with time for their customers, an organisation rooted in its neighbourhood.

The Post Office, the train companies, retailers, gas companies and their electricity counterparts all seem to have forgotten something in their rush to tech: to put service into the service economy. They need to restore it fast, for all of us, but especially for our older citizens.