No, we’re not talking about battery hens… or are we? A few days ago, in a radio interview about economic matters, the interviewee lamented the fact that for so many shareholders the ordinary customer is ‘the goose that lays the golden egg’. In fact, as we consider customer-relations, and the plight of ordinary customers these days, in a sense we could be talking about eggs – hard-boiled? fried? Scrambled, more like it, scrambled customers, scrambled customer relations, in which the customer seeking answers, accountability and satisfaction is treated more like a battery hen… trapped in a cage, and only valued for the ‘eggs’ produced, and discarded when the laying stops: it is beyond a yolk!
The customer is always…?
Like many readers, no doubt, I am fed-up with the increasing distance between the customer and the provider; long gone is the principle of ‘the customer is always right’. Instead, the poor old customer is – all too often – right at the bottom of the pile, under a long chain of middle-men: layers of involved people, more like barriers which impede accountability and customer satisfaction. Of course, each of these are taking their cut – at the expense of the customer. What follows are some examples of recent experiences which have caused me grief.
Christmas unfayre!
This happened to us at a Christmas Fayre; we bought a small gift for a friend, and – for reasons not relevant here – asked the stall-holder for a receipt. She couldn’t provide one in hard copy, but would send it – through a third-party agent – as a text message to my wife’s phone. Since I needed to print out the receipt, my wife forwarded the receipt to me. Weeks later we were aware of several payments made from our bank account to two companies we simply didn’t recognise. Several phone-calls to Lloyds (at night, because by then we were in New Zealand!), and my own internet research, revealed that scammers had intercepted one of the text messages and thereby discovered our bank details… and had begun to draw small sums to start with, and then increasing amounts. Lloyds stopped the payments, but didn’t accept that this was a case of fraud, and we were out of pocket to the tune of about £80… all because a trader couldn’t give us a written receipt, but instead relied on an intermediary to issue one. Layers again.
Don’t bank on it!
Earlier today I heard an interview with the CEO of Lloyds Bank, bragging about the performance of the bank and the 30 per cent increase in dividends. Rather sickening given our experience in Totnes. For over 4 decades we had banked with HSBC and its precursor Midland Bank. When they closed their branch in our town a few years we considered moving to Santander… until the manager told us during our introductory chat that they would be closing their branch here in a couple of weeks! So it was that we moved to Lloyds, where we were assured that our local branch would never close.
Hmmm… promise broken: our last remaining bank closed in January; we don’t even have a banking hub, and Lloyds prevents its customers from paying in cheques at our post local office – which itself is at the back of a rather small (in)convenience store. In a current TV advertisement, Lloyds claim to help customers paying in cheques… Irony… not so in our case, other than by travelling a few miles to the branch in a nearby town.
OK, so we do most of our banking online but we refuse to add yet more apps to our phones; as an example, the other day my wife, when trying to post a birthday parcel to one of our grandsons in New Zealand, was called ‘old-school’ at a different post-office because she doesn’t have their app. Dealing with Lloyds on the phone is usually OK, though all too often it takes dealing with several layers of automated filters, and several direct calls or transferred calls to get to the right department. Customer satisfaction? Zero… almost. Why does it have to be so? Is the money saved on premises and staff for the benefit of customers? Shareholders, more like.
Double inconvenience!
When we needed to replace a loo a few months ago, I ordered a new one from B&Q online. Simple – or so it should have been! For some odd reason, B&Q’s online system recorded orders for two loos (nothing to do with a city in Southern France!) As soon as I received two separate emails with delivery information, I realised the error and rang B&Q Customer Services. Of course, that was not enough, as I then had to contact their outside supplier; somehow the message didn’t register and the dispatch of the two loos went ahead. Another phone-call: I was told simply to reject one when they arrived, and would receive a refund when the depot got it back. The sub-contractor van driver was pleased not to have to unload one of them, but annoyed to have the inconvenience of not having an empty van at the end of his delivery run. Then it was a case of chasing for the reimbursement of the cost of a loo once the spare had arrived back at the supplier’s depot… and chasing, and chasing! The final phone-call in the saga lasted 42 minutes, and there had been almost 30 emails. Enough to make one feel a bit flushed.
Frozen out!
Yet another recent frustrating wild-goose chase involved our fridge-freezer. It started with a persistent leak of water, not being cleared via the typical pipe I had successfully unblocked in our previous fridge-freezers. I contacted a certain major national purveyor of electrical goods and domestic appliances where we had bought the incontinent icebox a few years ago. It was way out of warranty: all I wanted was advice as to a suitable repair service. After several phone-calls I was finally put through to a person who was able to locate the delivery details, but not confirmation of the actual purchase… hence refused to help. In the end we went in person to the store where we had bought the appliance to speak to the duty manager: equally unhelpful – causing us to vow never to buy anything there again… we’ve renamed the store Crappys. In the end, we asked our local high-street electrical shop for a recommendation: the technician they recommended visited a couple of days later and sorted our problem out quickly and efficiently – and at a good price.
Parking not fine!
When I booked airport parking on the airline website in conjunction with a holiday flight last year, I rang the parking facility before travelling – only to discover that the airline’s intermediary had only booked our car in for 24 hours… no wonder it was so cheap! Once again, a plethora of frustrating phone-calls: the airline suggested I contact their parking agent… they claimed to know nothing, and suggested contacting another parking agent… and so it went on. In the end, we had to make other arrangements, and the parking facility concerned, which we had often used before, offered to give us a discount next time we booked with them. Once again, the problem resulted from having to deal with the layers of intermediaries rather than dealing direct person-to-person.
No way out!
Some months ago, we came home from a trip away to discover ‘Road closed’ signs at each end of our cul-de-sac. The dates stated on the signs meant complications for us: I had booked to have some work done in our garage, and road closure would mean access problems. Besides, within the three-day road closure stated on the signs, my wife and I both had medical appointments, and a neighbour’s husband was seriously ill in hospital. Two other neighbours are doctors: closure of our road was going to mean huge inconvenience for our little neighbourhood.
The road sign gave a phone-number; as neighbourhood watch coordinator, it fell to me to sort things out: I started a marathon of phone calls to the sub-contractor’s department which organised the road closure, to the manager of the local team programmed to dig the necessary trench, as well as to BT Openreach who had commissioned the work; in addition, to our local council and Devon Highways, both of whom were as confused as the rest of us as to the actual route of the trench, because the map e-mailed by the contractors could be interpreted in different ways.
The morning the work was due to start, I stood in the drizzle at 7.30am, chatting to the team who had arrived with their digger, sitting in their truck awaiting instructions. In the end, it transpired that they didn’t have the necessary permission to dig across a private drive, so the whole project was postponed… after causing huge worry and stress to our neighbourhood. I had made 38 phone calls in all, written about as many emails to neighbours and the agencies involved… and eventually received emails from different departments at Devon Highways thanking me for getting the confusion sorted out for them!
What does this say about accountability? The many ‘layers’ of people involved, and the lack of communication between them gave rise to a staggering level of confusion. The greater the distance between the ordinary citizen and those responsible, the lower the level of accountability and customer satisfaction.
Drawing threads together…
These are just a handful of the customer experiences which have raised my blood pressure over the last few months. So, what are the common threads? Contractors and sub-contractors; systems – automated, online, impersonal – systems that create distance, sideline actual people, save the company money, and – presumably – feed greater dividends to shareholders. Telephone ‘virtual assistants’ are another example; one I dealt with recently was incapable of recognising my postcode. One could go on… The net effect of all this is to create ever-increasing distance between the poor old customer and whoever should be accountable. The shareholder wins and the customer loses out – treated as the goose that lays the golden egg of profit.
Priorities
To sum up, society’s priorities should surely be: ‘customers before shareholders’, ‘people before profit’. Yet, in so many ways, the customer is treated like a battery hen – not even a goose laying a golden egg.
