Malone on the demise of customer service

Is it me or has customer service become ridiculously bad? You’d think because of the recession, keeping customers or making new ones would be pretty important… You’d think that companies would be bending over backwards for people.

Instead, staff in shops and cafés seem worse than ever. Call centre staff are more polite! I guess call centre staff are trained on how to empathise with customers. Of course, I still get the odd annoying call from overseas: “We’re not selling anything.” Really? Good. And I slam the phone down. I hope they’re not long lost relatives calling to inform me that Uncle Harry has left me millions in a Hawaiian bank account. (As well as a small dog called Chi-Chi). Harry would definitely have put it in his Will that Chi-Chi was part of the inheritance, and what would I do with it? I hate dogs. Thank God I don’t have an Uncle called Harry. My Uncle is a Liverpudlian scally. All he’ll leave me is some parking fines and stuff from the back of a lorry that I’ll have to dispose of discreetly.

“I’m like a ruined Carrie Bradshaw on my Play-Doh-splattered Macbook, wearing Primark pumps instead of Manolo Blahniks”

Sales calls always happen just as I am putting my child to bed! It must be karma (I have actually done their job; calling families at kiddy bedtime to sell them insurance for potato peelers or something equally pointless). It’s best not to listen to the rep, as after the sales pitch you wonder if you actually do need insurance, after all, you do get through a few potato peelers… I wonder if these sales staff would be so friendly if they had to deal with customers face to face. Right now, I’m sat writing in a café like a ruined Carrie Bradshaw on my Play-Doh-splattered Macbook, wearing Primark pumps instead of Manolo Blahniks. And the service is terrible. They can’t make tea. Yes, tea! They use the hot water from the coffee machine instead of boiling it, so the tea always tastes awful. There’s only one rule in tea making and that’s boil the blummin’ kettle. I asked once if they could boil the water and they treated it like a special request, and microwaved it for me… um, thanks. They made me feel like I was being a pain asking for a drink that actually had taste rather than just drinking brown water.

Then there’s the eatery claiming to be ‘very child friendly’ but refuses to do a child portion of chips. What else do kids eat? Please don’t call yourself ‘very child friendly’ unless you literally cartwheel over in a clown outfit and offer to babysit while I go lick the windows of Kurt Geiger for a few hours.
I wonder if it’s because there’s less jobs during a recession, so over-qualified people are taking jobs they really don’t want to be in. Hence the resentful attitude that seems to be the norm in modern customer service.