Whatever happened to the concept of customer service? - Ismail Mulla

If you went to a clothing retailer and happened to purchase the wrong item, you could simply return said item with the tag on and you’d get your money back - cash. No waiting for a bank authorisation for several days on some godforsaken app.

When things went wrong there was a human being who took charge and set about righting the issue as soon as was humanly possible.

Those that excelled on these fronts would get the level of marketing that money could not buy.

However, there has been a marked slide when it comes to customer service in recent years. It’s turned into an after-thought and is in danger of becoming non-existent.

Even in the early days of online retailing, if something went wrong with an order, there was someone that could be contacted and the item refunded or returned quickly. But that is no longer the case.

The other day I went to a supermarket and I saw an elderly couple who were struggling to reach an item that was on the upper shelf. I’m hardly a basketball player but I got onto my tip toes and just about managed to palm the box of tea that they were after and passed it to them.

A warm thank you from the lady and a joke from the gentleman followed. But as I looked up and down the aisles of the supermarket there was no staff on hand. The aisle next to it was also shorn of staff and the one over from it.

Instead there was a covey of workers at the infernal self-checkouts. They were flapping around trying to deal with one problem after the next. ‘Unexpected item in the checkout area’, ‘approval needed’, ‘sorry item is not recognised’ blared out these cold machines.

Just this week I was in one supermarket when we were confronted by one of those ridiculous cleaning robots. To say it was disconcerting is an understatement.

Rather than making shops more impersonal, perhaps retailers might be better served adding a human touch. Someone to say hello to, share a joke with and perhaps even ask for help.

I do genuinely feel sorry for the elderly amongst us. Some who spend time wandering around supermarkets just to keep warm. Let’s face it, turning on the heating at home is increasingly being deemed a luxury. These people are confronted with a worsening service, gimmicky robots and no one to turn to for help.

There was a time when a whole academic industry had grown out of a desire to understand customers better and meet their needs. Now, however, it seems like customers are increasingly slipping down the order of priorities.

Supermarkets no longer seem to care about a warm welcome. The best they have to offer is a game of Whack-A-Mole on pricing.

It would be churlish to not acknowledge the challenges that supermarkets and retailers at large face but it seems none of them take any pride anymore.

Increasingly shop floors resemble a jumble sale. Bits of detritus everywhere. Carefully considered displays replaced with a stack ‘em high and…I was about to say sell ‘em cheap but we all know that’s not necessarily the case.

Don’t get me started on the endless need for reward cards. If you’re not signed up you get penalised with eye-gouging prices. All to satisfy their need to extract more and more data from customers. How is that putting the average customer first?

And it’s not just supermarkets. I made the mistake of buying a pair of jeans online the other day. The size was too big and I wished to return them.

After endless form filling, I finally managed to print off a return label and upon taking the parcel to the drop off point, I was told that I needed to fill in more details at a computer. When I tried to input the data, I found out that the code I was given was wrong. Was this resolved by a human in the end? No, I had to chat to some bot via text message.

In the end, I cut my losses and got the other half to sell the jeans on eBay for a loss of a couple of quid. It was simply not worth the hassle.

Customer service? What customer service?