Tag: customer service

A Plague on Poor Customer Service

Its official – using Covid as an excuse to ignore your customers and deliver poor customer service is never going to work!

Hiding behind Covid as an excuse for poor customer service is never going to work. Just recently we bought 6 cases of wine. Absolutely nothing unusual about that – it’s a regular occurrence chez Sherman. We’re a thirsty lot, and dehydration, we’re told, is a dangerous thing. Especially for the elderly. So when one of our top tipples was on offer at a local supermarket, and they tossed in an extra 25% off 6 bottles or more, it was a no-brainer.

Two days later, our wine arrived. Now, here’s a question for you. If you order 6 cases of wine, are you being unreasonable in expecting it to arrive in 6 cardboard boxes? I don’t think so. But Tesco do. Well, to be fair, their staff don’t.  But the bosses at Tesco do.

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I’m as mad as hell

Complain to the top of the organisation. After all, a complaint is a gift to a service oriented company!

A credible role model?

Brian Cranston won this year’s Best Actor Olivier Award for his role of Howard Beale in Network.  In recognition, I thought his infamous mantra, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” should fire us up not to accept poor customer service.  Otherwise, you have to bite your tongue and meekly walk away.

Rant and rave

Not long after his appointment as CEO of Barclays Bank, the “Montreal Marauder” to give Matthew Barrett his sobriquet, remarked in an interview with the Independent newspaper in August 2001, “The consumer, whatever they are buying, is long suffering. A service revolution is a little overdue. I find the legendary politeness of the English to be not in their self-interest. I think they should be ranting and raving at the service they get, wherever they are getting it, banks included. The consumer cuts business too much slack in this country.”

Why did Matt mention only the English? Why didn’t he include the other home nations?  From Scotland, if speaking today, he could have chosen the Simpsons characterisation of a Scot in the form of Orkney-born “Groundskeeper Willie”.

Alternatively, that of Robert Carlyle’s foul-mouthed, violent Begbie in Trainspotting.  I’ll leave you to search Google for comparable examples from Wales and Northern Ireland.

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Flummoxed

“I’m flummoxed about why we’re hugely rewarding our organisational leaders to do what appears to me to be the wrong things”.

A favourite word of a US-based friend and business associated is “flummoxed”.  I rather like the word myself.  If you are as old as I am, you may recall a Monty Python sketch in which they attributed the characteristic of “woodiness” to certain words.  The was a positive appellation.  Flummoxed is a woody word.

I am flummoxed with what I see going on around me.  Although I am a Liverpudlian by birth, I will avoid our natural inclination to ignore the golden rule not to speak about politics and religion.  I am not going to slam-dunk popularism, nationalism or any other contemporary “-ism”, which suffix immediately makes a word “tinny” (see http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_4/23.htm).

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