You can’t go to a shop, art gallery, restaurant or hospital without being handed a form and asked to rate your “experience” on an idiotic “strongly agree/strongly disagree” scale. Businesses never used to pester us this way: they would work out if they were doing a good job by – “radical concept, this” – talking to customers, and observing their habits. Small businesses such as family-run restaurants and newsagents still do so. But not “Corporate Britain”. Big firms depend on feedback data because their managers never come into contact with customers and won’t delegate proper decision-making power to frontline staff who do. An encounter with the person in the shop increasingly feels as if it’s the two of you versus “a hidden global corporation that takes the profits but isn’t actually there”. Here’s my tip to business. Throw away the Q&A forms and just devote more energy to providing a better service in the first place. (Mark Mason, The Spectator)

You cannot be an effective manager unless you have a clear idea how you stand with your customers, snd this requires actually talking to them, not hiding behind telephonists and junior, semi-trained staff. I entirely agree with Mr. Mason. The bigger the company, the more insensitively they behave. British Telecom kept me waiting on the phone the other day for 18 minutes. When I finally got through to Bangalore the technical service woman had no idea how to answer my query (why should she on 5 dollars a day?). After all this time waiting I had actually found the bit on the BT website that answered my query (total fluke). So I read it out to her. Thank you, she said. It was her training for the day. In return I gave the company zero on every aspect of service. Waste of time, of course.