If you ever wish to face the full, ineffable futility of human existence, there are only two fool-proof methods: watch an episode of Mrs. Brown’s Boys or engage with a corporate customer service department. Whereas the first has been reliably awful since it first appeared in 2011, the second has definitely got worse. A recent poll by the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) put customer service satisfaction at its lowest level since 2010.
Pretty much every company is guilty, one way or another. Casual conversations with friends reveal – to pluck examples at random – unfairly cancelled and unrefunded Uber rides; hours of call centre purgatory with Lloyds Business Banking; and a Kafkaesque broadband installation nightmare involving BT and Sky blaming each other for the thick end of two months, only resolved by an engineer’s accidental call.
The underlying attitude is that customers are at best a necessary evil
Everyone is now familiar with the depressing, disembodied introduction: “We are experiencing higher than average call volumes.” This may have washed in the early days of the pandemic – but now? Apart from the mathematical impossibility of every company experiencing higher than average volumes, it’s transparent sophistry. The problem isn’t the number of calls, it’s the number of staff available to answer them. By the time you’ve listened to a three-minute menu, spent 45 minutes on hold, gone through security checks with five separate departments, tried to reason with someone reading from a script, and then been cut off anyway, you’ve pretty much lost the will to live, let alone exercise your consumer rights. As for chatbots – let’s just say there are few clearer indications of AI’s current limitations.
Yes, there are avenues for redress, but, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, every avenue is tortuous in its own way. And the moment anyone mentions the word “ombudsman” you’re more likely to bump into Elvis on Oxford Street than get your money back. How does one become an ombudsman? Has anyone ever met an ombudsman? Do they even exist, or are they an urban legend spawned from a throwaway remark on a long-lost episode of Watchdog or a first draft of The Pardoner’s Tale?
Staff are self-evidently the main point of contact between customer and company, and therefore crucially important to any business. But too many companies treat customer service as a black hole into which they shunt badly-paid and minimally-trained workers. Unsurprisingly, these turn out to be unskilled at dealing with customer problems and unwilling to be shouted at all day. The widespread outsourcing of call centre work adds another layer of disconnect. If a minimum wage worker is brought in to help a third-party company, why should they give a toss about their customers’ problems? The answer, all too often, is they don’t. The worker leaves in short order to get a job which either pays better or doesn’t involve being abused, and their replacement is soon equally disillusioned.
There are mitigating circumstances, of course, particularly for smaller companies. I know from friends who run countryside pubs how hard it is both to find and retain good staff in the sticks, a problem much less prevalent in cities, with their attractions for ambitious young people and easy access to zero hours personnel. But too often there’s an underlying attitude that customers are at best a necessary evil, and any problems are to be accepted rather than overcome. In the first summer of the pandemic my family and I spent time at two different hotels in the space of three weeks, one in Gloucestershire and one in London. Both were operating under identical social distancing regulations, but the difference was night and day: the city staff were cheery and dynamic as they worked around the restrictions, while the country staff were obstreperous and inefficient, using covid as a catch-all excuse.
It’s easy to see all this as yet another malaise, the latest in a long list of broken compacts in a divided and atomised nation. Society relies on compacts to function, and in most cases they are so deep-seated they scarcely need articulating. Governments should provide competent services with the taxation revenue they take from us; individuals should behave decently towards other individuals; companies should do what they say, and offer redress when they don’t.
The problem is, these compacts rely either on the good conscience of those involved or on demonstrable penalties for those who break them; increasingly, neither seems the case. Large corporations, in particular, have clearly crunched the numbers and decided it’s cheaper to reduce the number of customer service representatives (who are deemed cost centres rather than revenue generators) than worry about people taking their business elsewhere. Mostly, the sums add up because people can’t take their business elsewhere – when it comes to sectors such as airlines and broadband providers, there aren’t many viable alternatives. To paraphrase Caligula: let them hate, so long as they pay.
This harks to something deeper: the loss of simple human contact, the building block of society since time immemorial. Every self-service supermarket checkout, every unmanned tollbooth, every automatic hotel reception is another tiny nail in this vast coffin. Of course, there are sound economic reasons for making such developments, but equally sound social reasons against them. We need to strike a balance.
Businesses think consumers want to feel a connection with their brand, but in fact most consumers place higher value on pragmatic, efficient and empathetic solutions to specific problems. Talking to a well-trained and sympathetic human being is still the best way to ensure this. The demise of the traditional bank manager is a perfect example: here, usually, was someone who knew you, your finances, even your family, and would listen to you even if they ended up being unable or unwilling to help. Who, apart from those who bank privately, has a bank manager these days? Of course, online banking has a lot to recommend it – the best apps are staggeringly good in terms of layout, organisation and intuitiveness – but sometimes you just want to talk to someone rather than jump through a million electronic hoops, only to hear “computer says no”. (A lot of Little Britain has dated very badly, but that particular sketch feels like prescient genius).
Things go wrong all the time, and they always have. (The first recorded customer service complaint dates back to 1750 BC, when a customer called Nanni carved a 294-word diatribe on a rock to his copper ore supplier Ea-nasir.) Customer service is how a company reacts to screw-ups, and done well this doesn’t just rescue a situation but can sometimes make it better. Last year a faulty shower flooded our hotel room. The management not only apologised profusely, they also moved us to another hotel in their chain free of charge (including taxi ride) and comped an excellent dinner with champagne for three people that night. As a result, I am even more likely to recommend them than I would have been had we just enjoyed a pleasant but unremarkable stay. (A shout out to Cubitt House group).
The wider problem of customer service works both ways, however, and the customer is by no means blameless. Many retail staff note that customer behaviour is getting worse, though perhaps it has never been great – as far back as the late 1980s, doing shop work in my university vacations, I thought a mandatory two years’ retail employment for young people in lieu of national service would show them how awful the public can be and thereby hopefully make them behave better as customers themselves.
But now we have a vicious feedback loop where customers behave like jerks, which prompts staff to put minimal effort in/hide behind electronic menus/leave the profession, which further lowers customer service standards, which so enrages customers that they behave like even bigger jerks than before, and on it goes. This in turn has its roots in the mantra that “the customer is always right”, which dates back at least a century (it has been credited to Harry Gordon Selfridge among others) and is, in its own way, as much a breach of the compact as anything else. The customer is not always right, and telling them that they are stores up unrealistic expectations and demands on both sides.
Sometimes you just want to talk to someone, not jump through a million electronic hoops
Last autumn, a tweet by Andy Haynes went viral. “I’m in Paris and I ordered an oat milk latte and the waiter said no,” he wrote. It was both very funny and magnificently French, but also spoke to a truth our Gallic cousins have never forgotten: that every good transaction and relationship involves both parties being happy with it. French waiters are respected as professionals with expert knowledge, and if they think a customer order goes against the standards of their establishment, they will stand their ground.
In this, perhaps, we can see what a wider future of good customer service looks like: a vendor proud of their products and services; a customer service representative trained, paid properly and treated as a skilled worker with agency and discretion; and customers who appreciate their experience and want to come back because they know they’re in good hands. By placing value over price, good customer service is the precise negation of Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic. Good service is important because decent, friendly and mutually respectful human interaction is worthwhile in and of itself. We should therefore all be more like French waiters. Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d write.
Boris Starling is an award-winning author, screenwriter and journalist. His latest novel, “The Law Of The Heart”, is out now
