Customer service? You must be joking

WHEN THE dust finally settles, the commercial prosperity and thus the economic wellbeing of this country may have less to do with Brexit than with the attitude of corporations, companies and workers in general.

In the meantime, and no doubt for quite a while afterwards, Brexit will be a convenient “whipping boy” in our blame culture.

A typical example is the ongoing scaremongering over migrant labour from Eastern Europe. The more dust that is kicked up and prevented from settling, the less clear (politicians hope) will be our view of the efficiency and hard work ethic of the huge number of agricultural and hospitality workers who are currently keeping our economy afloat.

Clearly British workers refuse to do those jobs otherwise they’d be doing them, and the benefits system doesn’t provide any incentive for people to find work.

Our coal mines have closed, our steel works have closed, those of our car manufacturers still in business are mostly foreign-owned, and so the list goes on.

What the country now relies on are service industries, but experience increasingly proves that CEOs and managers seem to know less and less about service and certainly that component of what they dare to call “customer service”.

A recent editorial in this newspaper described the customer service of one of our budget airlines as “cavalier... bordering on the negligible” and its management as “riding roughshod” over the interests of travellers. There’s a lot of it about.

Also in these pages columnist Jayne Dowle recently recounted her abysmal experience of trying to deal with a certain telecommunications company. Such experiences prove the point I have made for many years now that they are the very worst at communicating.

Many make it extremely difficult to contact them in the first place: addresses are hard to come by, telephone numbers are not provided and emails only offer electronic options.

If only they didn’t have to deal with customers at all! To avoid the call centre route, I recently wrote to Virgin Media in an attempt to obtain a new TiVo box and broadband hub as some sort of justification for their increasing their charges yet again.

The reply I received saying someone would call me within two weeks. They didn’t and so I wrote a second letter to her which was totally ignored.

I then spoke to someone on the end of a telephone who offered a standard apology for the non-response and then informed me that I couldn’t have either a new TiVo box or hub.

Whatever happened to “the customer is always right” and where was any customer service?

Of course the trouble is that Virgin, Sky and BT are basically the only shows in town and if you don’t do your telecommunications business with them, you don’t do it at all.

However, having people over a barrel, in that sense, is no excuse for being arrogant or discourteous, but they will continue to get away with it as long as the communications watchdog Ofcom is as toothless and disinterested as it repeatedly proves itself to be.

I spent several years living in the United States, which has always had a very strong customer service and customer satisfaction ethic.

Returning to this country, my experience for a while was that things seemed to be gradually moving in that direction here also, and in many respects that is still the case – but there are certain corporations and businesses that seem to thrive on disregarding their customers and the poor customer service they provide, and they appear to have very little concern for any negative effects this might have on their business.

And, of course, the bigger they consider themselves to be, the more cavalier they are.

Once upon a time if you did your job badly you’d be out on your ear, but these days our compensation culture ensures that failing executives and CEOs are handsomely rewarded for their incompetence and, even if they are forced to resign, or they jump before they are pushed, they leave with a golden handshake that makes it folly to stay – even folly to do well in the first place.

Oxymoron of the year: customer service.