Tonight over dinner we were discussing the bad service companies offer their customers. It was quite a hotly discussed topic, but rather one sided. It boiled down to the fact that the three of us thought that in general large companies provide a really pathetic level of service. Check this post as an indication of what happens out there.

In terms of retail shops I had been pleasantly surprised to find Marks & Spencer to offer some unusually polite and helpful service. It was a few weeks before Christmas and the superstore near us in Brighton had some people working there who were unbelievably pleasant to deal with. We were pleasantly shocked. Then a few days ago I went in again, and while looking for some ordinary drinking glasses, I was caught in the cross-fire of three shop assistance who were, loudly, discussing some pathetically irrelevant merchandising detail e.g. which way to group glasses, high price on the right descending to low prices on the left was the final decision. Needless to say, I left the drinking glass purchase for another day, and possibly another store.

What a disappointment. What an unprofessional way of doing business. Merchandising, surely, should be decided on when the store is closed to customers. I have also often found in both Waitrose and Sainsbury that staff discuss personal affairs amongst each other while they are stacking shelves or performing other duties. Hello! I don’t actually want to hear whether so and so fancies another person. What is it with this unprofessionalism?

So I read in one of my newsletters that there is a conflict between what companies feel they should be offering customers and what customers expect a company should be offering. The writer maintains that companies have to report to their shareholders and are under an obligation to provide shareholders with a high return on investment, the highest possible return. This means that production costs have to be cut and product quality is not the issue amongst other profit enhancing activities. For the customer, who is he again?, the issue of value for money is kind of important. (How dare he, doesn’t he know he isn’t important in this equation…). With other words, there isn’t a meeting of minds, or the management of customer expectation, or any form of adherence to business ethics at all. The company will deliver the shoddiest service/product it can get away with and some they shouldn’t actually get away with at all. And CEO’s earning the most embarrassingly indecent salaries, are totally sheltered from any customers’ complaints.

I find this unbelievable. What about the concept: without a customer, a company has no business? Or the customer is King. Anybody out there find this to be a really difficult concept to understand? Possibly it is time for the little people, the customers, the stupid consumer etc. to actually stand up and be counted. But the really sad, sad part of this story is that us little customers, can’t actually get to speak to the idiots who make these kinds of decisions. You end up talking to – more likely raving at poor, underpaid, overworked call centre people in India who have absolutely no contact with decision makers. And who have to put up with this kind of abuse constantly, because they are the ONLY people you can get hold of. It is really every bit like idiot Bush who sends more troops into Iraq. And the troops know that it is futile, but whom do they speak to, to complain. Their sergeant? Ha.

I would love to set up a call centre staffed only with CEO’s. Wouldn’t that be fun? Does this post sound like I am slightly peeved? You bet. One of my previous posts discusses the principle of “lead generation” and the idea that if one actually kept ones customers, lead generation would not be quite as important. Difficult one, that one.