Because it is August and I am about to go on holiday, I have taken a break from my usual obsessions about interest rates and inflation. Instead, I have found myself wondering about the quality of the services that we receive from various corporate providers, such as banks or utilities.
I am concerned about the growing evidence that customer service in this country is deteriorating at an alarming rate.
I recently had a painful interaction with a large savings institution. The problem started off being my fault because I had left money in my accounts with them for years without any transaction or communication. During that period I had moved house, changed telephone numbers and got divorced.
What made it worse was that I could not find any record of my password. When I tried to withdraw my money, there followed an endless series of phone calls, letters and emails.
I remember on one occasion when I thought I was getting somewhere, not unreasonably, I had to pass security. When I was asked the middle name of my first child, I answered “Jane” only to be told “sorry this is the wrong answer”. You would have thought that I would know better than this institution the names of my children.
The voice then moved onto a new question: “What was the name of the city in which your wife studied for her degree?” I said that I didn’t have a wife, only to be told that this was not a permitted answer. What’s more, having failed two security questions I would now have to go back to square one and go through the whole procedure all over again. I felt like a character in a Franz Kafka novel.
Another recent instance was with a well-known utility. The problem here was that I had been sent a bill which gave me three different sorts of readings for my electricity usage. These came under the separate headings of “estimates”, “we read your meter”, and “smart meter readings”. Confusing enough, but made even more so by the fact I don’t have a smart meter.
Not only that, but the firm in question had told me ages ago that it was impossible to fit one in my house.
Nearly all corporate entities now rely on computer-based communication with their customers. But what on earth happens to all those millions of people who don’t own a smartphone and don’t know how to operate a computer?
I don’t know about you, but when I am invited to press one for this, two for that and three for the other, I fall into a state of despair. The very fact that I am calling up is because something has gone wrong in our relationship. And in my case, usually neither one, nor two nor three corresponds to my problem.
After an inordinate amount of time being barraged with an endless rendition of Greensleeves or some such holding music, if you are lucky, you may eventually get through to a human being – who often doesn’t know you from Adam.
It raises the question as to why customer service is slipping at such a rate?
I suppose this could be another example of broken Britain, where nothing works anymore. But I suspect that there are similar problems in other countries.
The root cause, I think, is that most organisations have failed to establish satisfactory interfaces between their staff, modern communications technology and their customers. Often the staff do not know quite how the technology interacts with customers or they are dismissive of them.
The prevailing assumption seems to be that customers should be fobbed off with the website or some robot. What is supposed to be clear is nearly always completely opaque.
The general principle is that the more connected the organisation is to the public sector, even in the past, the worse the service. Similarly, the larger the organisation, whether public or private, the worse the quality of customer service.
One of the things that really gets my goat is that when you are invited to send in a document by post to an organisation as large as HM Revenue & Customs or one of the major utilities, typically they will not give you a named individual to send it to, or often, even a department. So there has to be some central mail collection unit whose job is to read these things – at least one hopes – and then distribute the said material to the appropriate department.
If there is no individual who is responsible for your query to whom you can respond and who can be held to account, then it is all too easy for your communication to get lost or to be ignored. And lack of continuity means that you frequently have to deal with someone who is not at all familiar with your case and you have to recite the details from the beginning.
My favourite example of corporate non-communication concerns a utility that was at least trying to do the right thing. Journeying out of London by train one day, I found myself sitting next to a blind man. Let us call him “Fred Smith”. Chatting to him, I discovered that he was on his way to a meeting with a major utility which had wisely asked him to act as their adviser on how to interact with their blind customers.
When Fred got off the train, I could see through the window that the utility company had kindly sent a driver to meet him. He was holding up a sign saying: “Fred Smith”. You really couldn’t make it up.
Roger Bootle is senior independent adviser to Capital Economics
British customer service is fast descending into a tragic Kafkaesque comedy - The Telegraph
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