In thinking poor customer service is killing British businesses?

[reasonableme]

I called Barclays bank the other day about a suspicious transaction in my account involving a huge sum. The lady in the fraud team didn't have a clue and wanted me to do the research instead. I kept saying I really don't know who the payee was and that's what I would expect my bank to know. She got rude with me quickly and said she is not going to repeat the information for me. I asked her why she was getting mad at me when I was asking genuine questions? She snapped at me and said she is not going to engage in a conversation with someone like me and disconnected the call right on my face! Didn't have the patience to listen to anything I said after I asked her why she was upset with me. All I was trying to do was to understand a suspicious transaction. I complained but Barclays closed the case saying ok, we heard you.

The other day, I was emailing Nuffield Health gym for some personal classes and they said I need to be a member to get 1-1 lessons. Fair enough. I shared my number and asked the lady to give me a ring so we can discuss options to get a membership. She has not emailed or called me until now. It's almost like they don't want any new customers!

I called 2 companies to get a softener at home. They were nice enough to send their sales people to my house. They emailed me their quotes and after that they went cold. Didn't even follow up to see if I was interested. No calls after that.

This is the pattern I have been noticing in various (unrelated) industries. An utter disregard for the existing customers and zero/ low interest in getting new customers and I think this is partly why businesses fail. What do you think? Am I expecting too much?

The first one is difficult. The bank only know what you know until such time as you say you definitely didn't authorise it and it will then be taken on as a fraud case. This involves a specialist team and hours of investigation.

If you just said 'tell me what it is' then The CS advisor can't do much as they only know as much as you do. The best course of action is not to immediately call the bank but do your own research; Google the payee, wrack your brains and diary for what it could be and THEN call the bank and say it's an unauthorised transaction.

I ordered some shoes recently from Simply Be. Wrong pair arrived, so I emailed to say what had happened and they sent another pair out. Same wrong pair arrived again, so now I've got 2 pairs of the wrong shoes. Completely different code on the box to the order note.

I tried to explain via live chat that they've got the wrong code on to what I ordered but the person on the other end couldn't have cared less. So it's cost me £3.99 twice to have the wrong thing delivered and I've had to piss about taking them back to a returns shop.

I won't be ordering from them again - I ordered direct from the manufacturer and not only were they cheaper but delivery was free too. Lesson learned.

I used to work for a company who consistently got slated for their customer service. There were many reasons why the service was so poor.

• the pay was horrifically low, barely above minimum wage
• the hours were awful with no flexibility, in order to provide 24hour service
• your targets were largely unrealistic, eg. Reply to 100 emails an hour. So there was no incentive to spend time finding solutions, if anything you'd be in trouble for it.
• nitpicking from management about time spent at your desk. They'd add up all the time you were late at logging back on and you'd get pulled up if it was more than 5 minutes in a week (given the computers were antiquated junk you were often late due to technical issues), time you spent after work was however not taken into account, conveniently. On one occasion we were forbidden from filling water bottles in the kitchen as "they took too long" and had to use cups instead.
• They kept the different sections of customer service very separate, so you usually couldn't solve a problem yourself, you had to pass the customer to another department (who usually then had to pass them to another department) Making the customer feel like they were being fobbed off.
• I worked in the social media team, where the rule was that you had to reply to public messages first. But obviously you couldn't discuss much publicly due to GDPR. So you spent your day asking people to send a private message knowing you had no chance of actually reading them. And the slower you were to reply to the private messages, the more public messages you had to wade through.
• Very high staff turnover - the ones who were happy to coast along and didn't care too much tended to stick around, but anyone who actually wanted to be able to do a good job got frustrated and left.

There were some very good staff there, who cared and would always try to go above and beyond, but mostly it was full of depressed, disillusioned staff with no incentive to do any more than the barest minimum.

From what I've heard since I left, once the pandemic hit, rather than trust the staff to work from home they got rid of most of them and outsourced overseas.

Fwiw I moved to another company where they didn't do any of the above. The pay could have been better, but was at least at the high end of the industry standard. And it was reflected in the customer service they gave. You'd obviously still get complaints, especially in social media, but they were noticeably usually the customers who had been in the wrong and just wouldn't accept it. Unlike the first company where the customers were more often right and badly treated.