Editorial: Speak out against bad service

Photo / Steven McNicholl

This morning's paper is a bumper issue, thanks to the ads placed by retailers who want you to head to the Boxing Day sales as soon as you've done the Christmas dinner dishes.

Retailers rely on December for much of their annual turnover: Christmas shopping and the sales starting today are when they have a captive audience. But to judge by the way some carry on, they're lucky to have any custom at all for the other 11 months of the year.

The deluge of feedback we get any time we run a story about poor customer service makes it plain that you're sick of retailers who don't know the meaning of the term.

You tell us about some shop assistants who don't greet customers; about others to whom the words "please" and "thank you" are alien terminology.

You can't stand it when they can't answer simple questions about what they're selling and don't seem interested in finding out what they don't know.

The only way these few could do it worse is by putting a sign on the door saying "Abandon hope all ye who enter here".

People who say things aren't what they used to be are often - though by no means always - hankering after a past that never existed. They look back through rose-tinted spectacles. But in the matter of customer service, it's certainly true that most of the "progress" over the last 25 years has been of the backwards variety.

The concentration of retail business into the hands of large corporations had a devastating effect on the small, local retailers who knew their customer bases well - often knew the customers by name - and knew holding on to them was the lifeblood of their business success. They accomplished this partly by a dedication to service - which is to say attention to the customers' needs.

Now, the biggest retailers compete almost entirely on price - and once they have induced you to run your plastic through their magnetic card reader, you risk becoming an after-thought. When Consumer magazine surveyed its readers last year it found that fewer than 50 per cent of people buying a computer at one of the large electronics stores rated them as providing good or very good after-sales service; the same figure for small local retailers as a group was 76 per cent.

It's something of a commentary on the age in which we live that we might regard a shop that gives good service to three out of four customers, rather than only half of them, as a success story. Customers are used to being grateful for small mercies, one supposes.

But while you're relaxing in your holiday spots this summer, we recommend you start thinking about doing your bit to make this change. Next year we encourage you to speak up. Let shop assistants know what you're dissatisfied with.

Ask to speak to the manager or owner. If that person is not on the premises, ask for contact numbers.

When you're calling a customer helpline and getting no help at all, ask to be put through to the person's superior. Keep calm - but keep asking until you get what you want.

In times like these, retailers need every customer they can get. But after a quarter century of forgetting how to treat people right, they may need a little refresher course.

And you may be just the person to give them some assistance.

Let's call it a retailers' survival gift from Santa.

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Merc free misery on Gold Coast

We do not know what Mark Hotchin got his beloved Amanda for Christmas and we don't think he's going to tell us. The former Hanover Finance chief and his wife are trapped in three-storey misery, with only a view of Mermaid Beach on the Gold Coast. He'd hoped to celebrate the festive season by chucking the missus the keys to the Porsche or the Mercedes he'd been wanting to ship across the Ditch, but that grinchy Justice Helen Winkelmann wouldn't let him.

Whatever Santa brought to Mermaid Beach, we find it hard to imagine it would have been cheap and nasty. Ditto Eric Watson: it's hard to pick what was under the tree at his digs in Knightsbridge, the down-at-heel part of London where he's forced to live. Did those packages contain something small and expensive - or just expensive?

Watson and Hotchin are in different situations, of course. The man marooned on Mermaid Beach was a director of Hanover but Watson was not listed as such. So far at least, his riches are safe from the depredations of the Serious Fraud Office and Securities Commission because he was only a promoter of some of the securities issued by Hanover Group, and not in charge of the business.

Of course, this distinction may seem a subtle one to anyone who lost their life savings in the Hanover collapse. They may just wonder how come the people responsible for making them poor remain so well-off.

The investors were offered a slight glimmer of satisfaction from this week's jailing of Marcus MacDonald and Nicholas Kirk, erstwhile directors of the failed Five Star Finance group. The pair were sentenced to 27 and 32 months respectively for various offences which had the effect of misleading investors.

The damage they have done to the lives of ordinary people is incalculable, but the price they are paying is little more than token. The maximum they could have got was five years but their sentences were halved for pleading guilty. The perception is that doesn't happen to a street hoodlum, particularly if he's brown. Like most crims, they won't serve their full sentence but their victims will pay for ever.

MacDonald and Kirk are only the first of many who are likely to be caught up with and punished.

But such leniency of sentencing will rightly dismay the public. We need to show white-collar criminals that their offending - predatory, sophisticated, deliberate and cynical - is profoundly offensive. We have no sympathy for them, particularly if they are lazing at the beach while their victims are destitute.