Brace yourself, businesses. The Institute of Customer Service’s annual name-and-shame-fest draws near (5-11 October.) Every year, the ICS polls the public to identify the Hall of Shamers among the UK’s biggest businesses — which companies stink at service, in other words.
The ICS poll is good at nailing the companies themselves, but there’s a category I’d like to add. What about those so-called services that never seem to work for the customer?
Here are some repeat offenders:
- The ‘home delivery’ service that struggles to deliver to your home, between the hours of 6am and 8pm, requires the promise of your firstborn before it can re-direct a parcel to your workplace and whose ‘network’ of depots exist each in a separate galaxy. If your parcel finds its way to one of these depots, pack a change of socks,and don’t forget to write.
- Air miles. Surely the most glorious proof of loyalty a customer can demonstrate. But try redeeming any of your 90,000 air miles and you’ll find that the next available flight is four years hence, leaving PoDunk airport at 3am, has more legs than a centipede and lands you at your destination 24 hours later than were you to row yourself across. By this time, the last cabbie in the world has clocked off for the night.
- Voice activated train timetables. You say tomato, it hears banana.
- The telco that bills you for calls to its ‘helpdesk’. (It’s a local call, you’re told. Not all that comforting when you’re on the mobile for 45 minutes, every day.)
- Pay-as-you-go telephone tariff “options” — a network’s way of telling you to get a contract. At least one provider’s tariff smorgasbord extends to two options, with the proviso that if you switch once, you cannot switch back. (And just try retrieving your voice mail…)
- The online retailers that promise delivery in one to three days, then five… Nope, dispatch in 10… until you realise that Just-In-Time delivery wasn’t created for you.
It’s not a good thing if a business cannot fulfil its basic brief (1) and it’s got to be wrong to imply you’ve got something in stock when you don’t, and won’t for the foreseeable future (6).
But the ones that really rankle are the so-called benefits whose benefit is lost on the customer.
So, while I wouldn’t want to discourage companies from going that extra mile, it’s worth remembering that if you raise a customer’s expectations, then dash them, you’ll be remembered for all the wrong reasons.
(Photo: ImNotQuiteJack, CC2.0)
