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. 

Muffy and me - a cat's tale

Whenever I am asked whether I miss office life, I always say that I don’t miss the office, I miss the people.

 I’ve spent two years and two months running my own business out of the spare bedroom at Warrillow Towers. I’ve looked at renting an office, or at least a desk in one, but it’s not easy to find and what space is available is expensive for what you get.

 There’s almost nothing in Tamworth so when someone for whom I have done some PR work offered me a desk in an office just over 20 miles away in Solihull, I decided to take a look.

 The office was good, the desk five times bigger than the one on which my computer rests as I craft this post; but weekly travel and parking costs would almost double the amount I was spending on the desk. So, it was back to the drawing board and this tiny desk.

 At least I know I’m not alone; the topic of working from home cropped up at a networking event this week and one of my fellow delegates, a solicitor, revealed that his daily companion was the family dog.

 Mine is the family cat, Muffin. A giant half-Maine Coon, who is 2ft 6ins long from nose to tail when sprawled across the bed behind my desk, he came to Warrillow Towers on the rebound, as it were.

 In the autumn of 2007, Mrs W and I lost our much-loved cat, Kylie; You can tell how old she was (roughly 18) because she was named after the Aussie pop moppet when she was still starring in Neighbours in about 1989. I was living the bachelor life in a dismal one-bedroom flat when she (the cat, not the Aussie..) came into my life.

 It was around this time of year - I recall I was watching a Five Nations rugby match on television. I had the front door open, as I often did in the hope that someone, anyone, would visit and break the dreariness of my weekend existence.

 I was in the kitchen making a cup of coffee when I heard a plaintive ‘miaow’ behind me. My visitor was a tiny little brown-and-white tabby. She belonged to my neighbour who was, to be frank, a bit of a reprobate. She hopped on to my bed, made herself comfortable - and was still in my life almost two decades later.

 Not long after, the reprobate was evicted for not paying his rent and left her behind.

Muffy ponders his next move on
 the chessboard - clearly an intelligent cat! 

 Mrs W (then Miss G) and I had been seeing each other for about 18 months at the time and, as committed animal lovers, were determined that the cat would not be left alone. I took her in to my bedsit, we took her to the vet, had her checked over and she soon became part of the family, moving in with us when we married in July 1990.

 She had quite a life, getting stuck in the roof of the half-built apartment block next to our flat, regularly vanishing into the yard of the Co-Op dairy down the road, losing the sight in one eye after a disagreement with a car, yet still being lively and active well into her second decade.

 When she went to the vets in autumn 2007 for a routine procedure and never came home, we were devastated. We thought we would cope but the winter of 2007-8 was just too quiet at Warrillow Towers so, in the following spring, we decided to look for another cat.

 A workmate of Mrs W’s worked voluntarily for a cat-rehoming charity and quickly came up with Muffin. His owner lived 12 miles away and was having to give him up due to an allergy to cats. We visited one night and fell in love with him.

 We like to think he fell in love with us; we call him the noisiest cat on the planet for his boisterous ‘miaow’ and a yelp which often sounds more like a dog’s bark than a cat expressing his feelings. 

 He’s not supposed to lie on the bed behind me as I work; Mrs W gets irritated by all the cat hair on the duvet cover. So I keep the ‘office’ door open and cast regular glances to my right as he snores on his bed on the landing. But I’m always alive to the sound of him stirring himself awake, stretching those giant limbs as he yawns himself into life, comes and rubs against my leg and then leaps onto the bed.  

 When my mobile rings, it’s not unusual for the caller to inquire ‘What’s that noise in the background?’ as Muffy (as we now know him) shouts to make himself heard in the conversation.

 It’s not quite the same as having what the Americans call ‘water cooler conversations’ with your colleagues but when I do get up to make a cuppa, Muffy chases me excitedly down the stairs.

 Would I go back to work in a big office environment? Emphatically not, for all sorts of reasons - not the least of which is that I don’t think I would find a company who would let my cat sit behind my desk all day. 

Are you listening, Prime Minister?

Rarely, if ever, does this blog enter the political arena. Almost eight months after I began these musings, I defy anyone who doesn’t know me as a close personal friend to say which way I voted at the 2010 General Election - and then you might still be wrong.

 Although I have a degree in politics, I generally keep my views to myself. Sure, I watch BBC Parliament far more than is healthy, I choose The World At One and PM as my radio listening of choice, but I would no more start a political argument in a pub than order a pint of Carling.

 But the current furore over the Government’s planned reform of the National Health Service has prompted me into putting finger to keyboard.

 I like the NHS; in fact, I owe my life to it. Having been born in 1964 with spina bifida and hydrocephalus and being the only one of three siblings who survived more than a few days with it, I am eternally grateful to the GPs and consultants who pulled me through my early childhood. The shock when it came back to bite me in the rear in the form of epileptic fits which I had not suffered for more than 40 years was crippling, in both a mental and physical sense.

 Over the past few years since the return of my epilepsy, I have spent rather too long in surgery waiting rooms, in consultants’ offices, having blood tests, brain scans and the like. Mrs W has endured similar experiences for different reasons; and we and many like us will tell the politicians arguing over the fate of the NHS that it does not need more competition. It does not need opening up to the free market; all the vast majority of people who use the NHS on an occasional basis want it to do is to work in a joined-up fashion.

 Let me tell you a story. Here is a patient who needs to have three tests done at an eye clinic. The patient is not yet suffering from any condition but has a family history so the NHS, quite rightly, is monitoring the situation every three months. 

 Yet the patient receives three separate appointments for three separate tests on three separate dates and it requires the patience of a saint and numerous telephone calls to persuade the authorities that it would be a good idea to do them all on the same day.

 The patient subsequently books the morning off work and attends a local hospital, only to discover that the clinic is only able to complete two of the three tests and wants the patient to return at a later date for the third - meaning more time off work.

 Cue a full and frank discussion as the patient produces a letter from their GP, confirming that all three tests will be done on the same day. Cue a harrassed receptionist, seeking a way out of the problem.

 A solution is eventually found and the first two tests take place just a few minutes after the appointed time. The patient is then told to go and have a cup of coffee in the restaurant as they have 20 minutes to wait before their appointment with the consultant.

 Duly refreshed, they return to the waiting room at the required time to find precisely three people ahead of them in the queue - and wait a further 90 minutes before being called in to the inner sanctum.

 Harrassed, tired, hungry and needing to get to work 20 miles away lest they let down colleagues, they undergo the test......which takes less than five minutes.

 Completely oblivious to their feelings, the consultant announces that nothing has changed since their last visit, “so I’ll see you in nine months. Goodbye.”

 And the authorities wonder why patients often have a dim view of doctors.

 I wonder how many MPs, the people in whose hands the fate of the NHS lies, have undergone that experience? How many have turned up at A&E at 9pm on a Saturday night, frightened for the health of their 80-year-old mother and still been there at 4.30am on Sunday?

 Politicians can talk until they are blue/red in the face about turning patients into stakeholders, into giving GPs control of their budgets, but all of it is meaningless until they can answer some basic questions. How can a patient arrive at their local hospital and produce a letter of which the consultant seems completely unaware? How can four consultations take 90 minutes? How can some doctors be so astoundingly rude to worried, anxious, patients?

 Until our politicians see the argument from the other side of the desk, all talk of NHS reform is nonsense.

A tale of two crimes

A snapshot of recession-hit, ‘why should I care about you?’ Britain at the end of January 2012.

 I began this week with a visit to a lady who I believe is going to do an enormous amount for the cause of naturism in this country. I won’t name her, because this blog post isn’t about her, but anyone who has any involvement with me on Facebook and Twitter won’t find it too difficult to work out her identity.

 We talked for hours on Monday afternoon and only a prior engagement in Tamworth forced me to end the conversation; she is enthusiastic, hugely intelligent, determined....just the kind of person British Naturism needs.

 We had never met before Monday but by the end of the day we were Facebook friends and following each other on Twitter.

 Then, on Tuesday, she posted on FB that another motorist had smashed into the back of her Smart car, crushing the rear panel, then driven off without reporting the incident.

 She can’t afford to claim on her car insurance, because it would put her premiums through the roof, so she will drive around in a bashed-up car for the foreseeable future until she can find a way to get the panel replaced.

 CCTV? Yes, there was a camera in the vicinity but it was pointing away from the scene of the crime so is no help whatever.

 Crime? Yes, that is what this was. The perpetrator has presumably given no thought whatsoever to the consequences for the car’s owner and not felt the need to own up to their actions. Thought for other people doesn’t come in to the mind of people who do things like this. Getting away from the scene as fast as possible so that their thoughtlessness/stupidity/ignorance doesn’t come back to haunt them is the only thing they think about.

 Fast forward to Tamworth town centre on Friday morning. With the sun not yet risen, a hard-working conscientious citizen opens their living-room curtains to start another day and realises that an ornament which has graced their garden for nearly two years has vanished. Next to where it stood when they went to bed the night before is a trail of telltale footprints.

 The citizen’s partner (your blogger) rises from his bed and spends the next hour combing every garden, bush, tree, wastebin shed, dustbin within half-a-mile of their home, looking for any sign of the missing ornament.

 Sadly, there is none.

 The ornament (a carbon-fibre statue of an English bulldog, since you ask) would cost around £40 to replace and it was almost in my mind to do so before Mrs W came home from work. But why should I? Why should I give people who have no thought for the property of other citizens the satisfaction that I had to put myself out and spend my hard-earned money to replace something they had stupidly and, probably, drunkenly stolen?

 It should be said that Warrillow Towers has been in this part of Tamworth town centre for nearly 17 years and this is the first incidence of crime we have suffered. But that is not the point. The point is that this country is creating a generation of people who probably think that stealing our ornament is funny; that smashing into my friend’s car, driving off and leaving her to face the consequences is not their problem.

 Well, it isn’t and it is. This country has to get back to a position where we all have respect for each other and each other’s property. We’re light years away at the moment, in my view. There are a million reasons for that, most of which David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and any other cosseted Home Counties-based politician have no idea how to tackle.

Rail, ale and a great day out

It’s 6am on Saturday January 7. Along with the rest of the Tamworth FC Real Ale Crew, I’m heading for Liverpool - via Birmingham.

 “You’re going the wrong way!’ I hear you cry. But wait.....there is method in our madness. The Lambs are, of course, due to play Everton in the third round of the FA Cup. Along with the 8-900 diehard fans, several thousand Tammies who have never/rarely seen the team play before are going to be at Goodison Park - and it seems as if most of them will be on the 7.30am train to Stafford (‘change at Stafford for services to Liverpool Lime Street’ as that nice lady  who does the station announcements has it).

 So the nine-strong RAC have a plan - the 7.09 to Birmingham means we can join the Liverpool train when it leaves New Street, at least guaranteeing us a seat. 

 That proved a wise idea because when it pulled in at Stafford, roughly 300 Tammies, most carrying bottles of Budweiser or cans of Stella, charged into the carriages.

 Now it wasn’t the quietest train journey I’ve ever had, but neither was it the rowdiest - and when we got to Lime Street, our different groups went our different ways. They headed off in search of the nearest Wetherspoon’s while we began a pub crawl which I definitely aim to repeat in the near future.

 The game? Oh, you know what happened. Tamworth played one of the best 90 minutes I’ve ever seen from a Lambs team and were heading for a deserved draw when, as a Villa fan I know put it, Everton’s Royston Drenthe hit the ground ‘just as you’re taught to fall over for a penalty when you’re on £30k a week’.

 Enough of that, then. The club banked a handy six-figure cheque and the town got a weekend of great publicity. 

 So back to the pub crawl. After breakfast and a rather wind-battered stroll around Albert Docks, we were off to Dale Street, the middle of the city’s business district and, it seems, home to some of its’ finest pubs. At 11.01, we were in the Ship and Mitre - 13 handpulls, separate pumps for foreign beers and four, yes, four floor-to-ceiling fridges full of continental bottled beers.

 We could have stayed all afternoon and one day, I will - but a stone’s throw down the road was the Vernon Arms. A proper old street-corner local, it had half-a-dozen real ales including a rum porter from Boggarts Brewery which tasted as if someone had made what is already a distinctive brew and then hurled three shots of rum in the glass. Fantastic.

The pub was also showing live football but as the American corporate giant which holds the TV rights to the FA Cup wouldn’t approve, we’ll draw a veil over that.

 Another few steps down the road to Thomas Rigby’s, which had the great advantage of having another pub, the Lady of Mann, in its’ back yard (the two share an outside courtyard and drinkers can stroll out of the back door of one pub and in through the front door of the other - perfect).

 Then, it was round the corner to the Lion Tavern where, as the CAMRA Good Beer Guide rightly notes, the pork pies were as good as the ale. 

 Pre-match prep completed at just after 2pm, our party quickly found three taxis for the £6 journey to Goodison Park - split nine ways, that was amazing value.

 Our cunning plan for after the game involved avoiding the 1805, the last direct train back to Tamworth, or so we thought, leaving the hordes to hurry home while we waited for the 1846 (change at Stafford and Birmingham for Tamworth) and took a bus journey back into the city for the White Star, just up the road from the Cavern Club (Apparently, a famous 60s beat combo have their roots around this part of the city). 

 Rather than music, the White Star deals in boxing and shipping memorabilia and still full of adrenalin, we could have stayed longer - but there was a train to catch and one final pub - the Cains-owned Dr Duncan’s by Lime St station. Finally, we had found a loud and rowdy venue but then, it was early on a Saturday night in Liverpool by now.

 That’s not to denigrate the beer quality, by the way; this was just as good as anywhere else and the nine of us can say we did not have a bad pint all day.

 And to top off the good news, the 1846 unexpectedly stopped at Tamworth, delivering us home just after 8pm. The perfect end to a perfect day - and no-one even felt inclined to argue about refereeing decisions.

A Christmas birthday party

Christmas excess was cancelled at Warrillow Towers this year; no presents, no decorations, no tree, no cards (to those of our friends who sent them - we will be making amends in the new year).

 There isn’t even that much alcohol in the house :( :(

 You only have to read the post below to realise why, of course; the afterglow of Sun Eden meant we were in no mood to prepare for winter festivities; summer, sun and the glories of the South African veld, still in our minds as we head into 2012, hopefully won’t go away for a while yet.

 That’s not to say that we didn’t have a family Christmas; although Mr W senior lives in Spain and is only arriving in the UK for a three-week visit on the day I write this, Christmas on the other half of the family was a very special time. My mother-in-law has tried for years to conceal her true age but an unfortunate encounter with her medical records this spring confirmed that she was, in fact, facing her ??th birthday.

 What made this even more special is that she was born on December 24. A perennial pain for those of us faced with buying two lots of presents for two consecutive days, the Yuletide financial grief is added to by the fact that one of her sons was born on December 16.

 Nevertheless, this year, we felt it was right to push the boat out for a special party, to be held eight days prior to the birthday. Relatives from the wilds of the Cotswolds and the far west of Ireland were contacted and cajoled into making plans to visit; friends in Tamworth were alerted; a venue was booked - and everyone was sworn to secrecy.

 Mrs W, of course, lay at Sun Eden for a fortnight, worrying whether anyone would bother to turn up on the big day and how and whether her mother could be cajoled out of the house. When the morning of December 17 dawned wet, cold and miserable, it seemed her fears might come true but when the phone started ringing mid-morning with calls from relatives checking that everything was still OK, she started to calm down.

 And we will never know whether Ma had the slightest inkling that something was going on.

 In the end, everyone played a blinder. The birthday girl’s niece and her husband arrived from Ireland while her sister looked a different woman from the sorry figure who lay in a hospital bed, gravely ill, earlier in the year; Mrs W’s brothers were on top form and the restaurant owner was totally relaxed about us sitting down to eat 40 minutes later than planned, then having to push an ever-so-slightly relaxed group of people out of the door four hours later.

 It was one of those afternoons which reminded me that you really must look after your parents as they get older. My own mother died at just 49 years and seven days, while Mrs W’s dad tragically got to nowhere near that age.

 Occasions like Ma’s birthday party are where lifelong happy memories are made. However much trouble planning such events may seem beforehand, you never know when it might be the last big thing you do for your parents.

 We wouldn’t have missed it for the world and the stunned, delighted, look on Ma’s face when she walked into the restaurant will stay with me for just as long as anything we did in South Africa.

 And it was definitely worth cancelling Christmas for. Happy New Year, everyone.