RUTH SUNDERLAND: Corporate vampires should stop treating us like trash

Here’s a thought for the New Year. It is a simple and foolproof formula to improve business performance, boost the economy and make the entire nation happier. What is the magic sauce? Good customer service.

It is an obvious point, but widely ignored. The rules we are routinely forced to endure are a national shame.

This applies to both Labour’s revered public sector and for-profit businesses. The cost of being given the runaround, whether by the NHS, the tax office or your insurance company, adds up to billions of pounds of lost productivity, as well as skyrocketing levels of collective stress.

The irony is that organizations spend a fortune trying to convince themselves that they are wonderful at service and that their customers love them.

They obsess over ‘net promoter scores’ and other ‘satisfaction metrics’, along with the silly ‘smiley face/angry face’ mini-surveys that infest their websites. The more they do it, the worse their real-life relationship with clients becomes.

While dabbling in corporate work on everything from gender identity to Palestine, too many companies have abandoned basic services.

They have become corporate vampires, giving us time and energy through processes that seem designed to frustrate us at every turn. So-called ‘Help Centers’ often do the opposite and ‘Contact Us’ should be renamed to ‘Don’t even think about calling us’. Customers are made to feel that we are annoying people, with whom it is best to avoid personal contact, and that we should not contaminate their phone lines with our concerns.

The result? The latest report from the Institute of Customer Service (ICS) found that satisfaction among large UK businesses is at its lowest level for 15 years.

It makes no sense for companies to behave so badly that they are despised by customers, regulators, the government and society at large. And it’s expensive: the ICS estimates that addressing service failures and issues costs UK businesses £6.8bn a month.

So why do they do it?

In some sectors, such as maritime transport or railways, there is little or no competition.

Even when there is, many senior executives seem to underestimate the misery of bad service, perhaps because they rarely experience it. They don’t manage their own lives, they have spouses and personal assistants who do it for them.

CEOs of customer-facing companies should spend at least one day a month on the shop floor, in the bank branch or in the call center to stay in touch with reality. Boards must have a director responsible for customer service.

Top executives complain that it is difficult to recruit good people for customer service positions. These jobs could be much more satisfying if the service were approached in a positive spirit. In many companies it is seen as a cost rather than a potential driver of revenue and profits, so ambitious employees see it as a backwater, not a path to the top.

It also can’t be much fun for frontline staff to try to appease people who have already spent years searching for a well-hidden phone number and then had to wait because “we are experiencing exceptionally high levels of demand” (pull the other one) .

Artificial intelligence could help, if it were not deployed as another weapon to confuse the poor customer, but used in combination with competent and empathetic humans.

The first thing we want when we have a problem is for them to listen to us and treat us properly as if we were important. Can it really be that difficult?