Companies’ customer service claims are not how they are painted
ONCE upon a time, I’d have been fizzing fit to pop but even grandmaster grumps can be worn down by big companies that crow about “customer service” when, to quote an old pop song, it’s just an illusion.
Still, I couldn’t let the carrier that failed to deliver my package on time have all its own way, so I filed a compensation claim – just to irritate someone at Feedback HQ.
I had been bombarded with text and email updates for hours as the delivery deadline approached.
The package was a tin of paint that had to be ordered online, which meant that - lucky me! – I could track its route… from the supplier in Wolverhampton to a distribution centre in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to a Sheffield depot, en route to my door in Derbyshire.
Even at 10pm, they were saying it would be with me that day. nd there was not even a digital apology when it arrived the next morning. How different to my experience in a real shop this week!
The young man who served me couldn’t have been friendlier or more attentive. For all I know, he had a degree in astrophysics but he put his heart into selling me a pair of trainers – and I was happy to add some insoles and yet another tin of protective spray to put under the sink and forget about.
It was otherwise a rather depressing shopping trip. This one was to Nottingham – but I guess most cities are much the same at present. Covid has hastened the death of many big names and little indies alike and, in a once-busy thoroughfare, shoppers were outnumbered by shutters and “closed” signs.
The chief destroyer of towns and city centres is, of course, the huge swing to online shopping, and the irony of my encounter with that shop assistant is that his generation is largely responsible for that, especially when it comes to clothing. Why struggle to try things on in sweaty cubicles when you can order as many as you want, as often as you want, online – and send them all back without any explanation or penalty?
It’s a far cry from the sense of trepidation that my generation grew up with in the 60s and 70s.
You’d only dare take something back if it was faulty. And you were lucky if you got a refund instead of a credit note that could only be spent in the same shop by some specified date.
Old-timers like to talk about “the good old days of personal service” but let’s face it: the shopkeepers ruled supreme – to the extent that my mother was once asked to leave the local Co-op because she was carrying another business’s carrier bag. Shops can’t afford such arrogance now but giants like my paint courier have turned it into a fine art: six days after an email promising an update on my claim, I’ve still not heard a word.
Old-timers like to talk about “the good old days of personal service” but let’s face it: the shopkeepers ruled