Doing the consumer a dis-service

Customer service. A simple term, defined by that unbeatable and all-encompassing fount of knowledge, Wikipedia, as “a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

 For anyone in business, it shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp. Someone is sufficiently keen on what you are selling to want to give you money for it, whether it be sandwiches, lawnmowers, pints of beer or a new suit. Therefore, it is your job to send the customer away happy with their purchase and feeling good about the transaction.

 Why is it, then, that rather too many British businesses haven’t the slightest idea of what constitutes good customer service? Why is it that in rather too many shops, the staff are too busy deconstructing last Saturday’s Britain’s Got Talent to help my wife look for a blue cotton top in the sale in a size ten? 

 Why can I spend ten minutes wandering around a store which is attempting to sell good-quality outdoor clothing without the proprietor even bothering to ask if she can help me?

Why does a well-known national pub chain (a clue - there seems to be one in every town) appear to have got where it is today by a) seemingly not bothering to employ staff at all in some of its pubs? b) failing to train the staff it has in order that they know what a decent pint of real ale looks, smells and tastes like?

 And why do some famous tourist attractions send you from pillar to post to buy a ticket, then shut down at 4pm on a glorious spring day in mid-March - when there is at least another two hours’ worth of good daylight available and willing customers queueing to hand over their cash?

 This latter incident happened to me on a day trip to Liverpool last week. Mrs W was with me by the banks of the Mersey, hoping to ferry ‘cross it (as you do...) as the highlight of an excellent day. Various different members of staff pointed us in various different directions for the ticket office, so that we spent a good 20 minutes wandering up and down the Docks until we finally were able to attempt to buy a (very reasonably-priced) ticket.

 At which point we discovered that we had just watched the last ferry of the day pull away from the dockside some five minutes earlier - it was just after 3pm.

 We consoled ourselves with an excellent 45-minute open-top bus tour of the city. Yet when we got off, after the tour had finished, we found several people hoping to join the next bus only to be told by the driver: “Sorry, that’s it for the day.”

 It was just after 4pm. 

 All of these are examples of how too many British businesses won’t go the extra mile to market themselves to bring in more customers, or create the right impression so that the customers they do have will come back.

 I’ve recently learnt of an organisation which devotes itself to providing training in customer service for retailers. I’m sure they do a great job and a campaign with which I am involved is hoping to use their services in the near future.

 But surely all of the above should be second nature to anyone running a retail business. As a freelance journalist, I know that if no-one knows I exist, then no-one is going to offer me work (which is part of the reason I write this blog). I also know that if I get the chance to work for someone, I have to do it to the best of my ability in the hope that they will remember me in the future.

 Yet too many retailers in the UK don’t seem to get it; it’s too easy to blame the economic downturn and the fact that ‘nobody’s got any money’ for the ills of their business.

 I’m sure businesses in other countries don’t adopt this attitude; they realise that the consumer is king and if people are keeping what money they have in their wallets, you have to work that little bit harder to prise those wallets open.

 Until retail businesses who are supposed to be a major driver of our economy understand that, Government tinkering with tax rates will not make one jot of difference.

A nose for news - and those who want to snuff it out

When I was a young news reporter on the Tamworth Herald in the late-1980s, our first job every morning was ‘police calls.’

 As we were a weekly newspaper with no urgent deadlines and our office was a five-minute stroll from the local police station, one of us would arrive at the station at 9.15 every morning and the duty sergeant would painstakingly take us through the incident book from the previous 24 hours.

 Much of it was mundane; minor house break-ins, car thefts and so on. But almost every day, there was at least one story which would result in what journalists call a ‘page lead’ - a story good enough to be the main story on a page in the newspaper.

 Often, it was a major robbery - of a post office, a shop and so on. Perhaps it would be the details of a court case which we had been previously prevented from reporting for legal reasons.

 Whatever it was, we would race back to the office and tell our news editor - a fearsome boss, but a brilliant journalist of a kind which is now all but extinct. He would take in all the details, know instantly the facts which we had missed but needed to find out - and then tell us not to come back into the office until we had the story in full.

 Even I, who was so good at ‘door-knocking’ that I retreated to an office-based job after less than four years in the trade, would do it willingly.

 Quite often, if the story was really good, the news editor - I’ll call him ‘JB’ because that’s what we called him - had a way of finding out any details which his reporters had been unable to unearth. In the days before smoking indoors was banned, he would reach into his jacket pocket, pull out a packet of 20, put a cigarette in his mouth with one hand (and light it at the same time), pick up the phone with the other hand and put in a call to the local police station. 

 Ninety-nine times out of 100, within seconds he would be talking to anyone from the duty sergeant upwards and would have the details. Because they all knew ‘JB’. It was his job to know them and it was their job to know him; it was his job to get the story and it was their job to make sure that the public whom they served knew what was going on in their town in terms of crime.

 And then, one day, after I had left the news reporters’ world for the milder climes of the sports desk, someone invented the police press officer.

 The press officer became the fount of all knowledge; often based miles away - in the Herald’s case, more than 30 miles away in Stafford - they decided what was news and what they would tell you. There were no more personal visits, the reporter was simply another voice at the end of a phone. 

 It was authority’s way of stopping journalists from uncovering the awkward, the unpleasant, the mildly embarrassing. And as staff cuts took an ever greater toll on newspapers, who no longer had the manpower to devote to chasing good crime stories, it did the job.

 Now, of course, press officers are everywhere; every football and rugby club worth its salt has one. Their job (and I acknowledge here that I have a number of friends who are football club press officers) is to tell the story as the club want it told; to be, if you will, a sporting version of the political spin doctor; to regulate access to players and backroom staff who would, less than 15 years ago, meet journalists after hours in the local pub and give them tips for stories.

 I mention all this because I have been listening this week with increasing irritation to the Leveson inquiry getting het up about ‘journalists bypassing the press offices and talking to police officers,’ in pursuit of a good story. 

 As someone has said to me today: ‘most of the police press offices were pretty clueless and didn’t actually know anything.’

 Which is why any good journalist, from ‘JB’ to Neil Wallis, Graham Dudman and Fergus Shanahan, would ignore them and go to the proper coppers.

One more thing.... on occasion, ‘JB’ would meet the senior coppers on our patch and have a drink and a meal with them. I don’t know for sure, but it’s not inconceivable that at Christmas, a bottle of something warming and Scottish may have changed hands.

 Is that corruption? Is police officers telling journalists something the public ought to know but which their bosses would rather keep quiet ‘leaking’?

 Many years ago, I heard this definition of a good news story: ‘Something which someone, somewhere, would rather the public didn’t find out about.’

 I do hope someone acquaints Mr Justice Leveson with that.