“My sister found herself in an awkward conversation with her broadband services supplier to whom she was making a complaint. After a sticky exchange she finally interjected:
‘If you don’t mind me saying so, you aren’t dealing with this complaint awfully well.’ To which the woman on the other end replied,
‘Actually, I’ve just been on a course on how to deal with difficult customers’.(!)
When it was gently suggested that her training hadn’t been altogether successful, she replied: ‘On the contrary, I got a distinction'” (quoted by Daniel Finkelstein in The Times)
I went to business school having already learned the importance of the people who pay your salary – the customers. At business school the strategy part of the course was excellent, and if you wanted to go into finance, also excellent (I didn’t). But they seldom mentioned that pesky person, the customer. The customer is regarded as, at best, a necessary nuisance, and at worst a statistic. This attitude is demonstrated by the almost universal rule that you can’t now get past the “sales associate” to speak to a manager. Indeed the sales people don’t usually know the names of those they work for. Management is distant and protected. If you discover a name and write to the person, you are ignored. This is entirely the fault of the business school ethos. Business school MBAs are simply markers for recruiters, something on paper that gives you a leg up at a job interview. They teach you nothing about real people who spend money with you.
My wife bought me a fitness band for Christmas. The makers claimed it was designed for use with an I-Pad, but required an app to interpret the daily data. It turned out that the name of the app, quoted on the instructions, couldn’t be found in the I-Tunes store, as advertised. After days of trying I had to go to the company website. Once downloaded, a message popped up saying it was not suitable for an I-Pad. When I complained, I was met with complete silence. I never received an explanation. This is what passes for customer assistance all too often. Difficult? Ignore it!
The obverse side of the coin
Chief executives of household-name companies would “complain bitterly if they had to wait months to receive their salaries”. Yet many “have no compunction in imposing long payment delays on their suppliers”. Heinz has just “more than doubled” the time it takes to settle invoices; the giant brewer AB InBev routinely takes up to four months to pay. Legally, this is above board: although a 2011 EU directive states that firms must pay suppliers within 60 days or face interest payments, the UK implementation allows companies to agree longer terms, provided they are not “unfair” to the creditor. Yet small suppliers, fearing reprisals, are in no position to protest an “abuse of power” that forces them to act as “unwilling bankers”, extending free credit to big multinationals for months on end. It’s time this bullying ended. The Government should give its Prompt Payment Code “more teeth”. Shareholders should sit up too. As we have seen at Tesco, whose accounting practices are currently being probed by the SFO, such “morally suspect” practices “may well be correlated with a deeper malaise”. (Ruth Sunderland, Daily Mail)
Things must be getting very bad if an article like this appears in the Daily Mail, the British equivalent of the New York Post. The Daily Mail has followed the corporate party line for a century and has never been known previously to criticise the Establishment.