BCSC - General - London, Westminster
Date: 24 Jan 2008
"Why am I forced to have two side orders of mushy peas because the button for one on the restaurant till isn't working? Why do I need a degree in quantum physics to understand UK train ticket prices? Why do most shop assistants I encounter look like they've been recruited on their ability to look indifferent?"
These were just some of the thorny questions posed by Mark Bradley, author of Inconvenience Stores: One Year in UK Customer Service, speaking to an audience of over 100 people from across the retail property industry at the BCSC members' lunch on 17 January.
Bradley used his uncompromising humour to bring to life our everyday experiences with customer service in the UK. Using examples such as meagre response rates to customer feedback cards, Bradley explained that customer service has a low profile in this country because the British don't like confrontation and British companies haven't found a way to encourage customers to offer constructive feedback. Conversely, he described an incident in the US where a customer used tomato ketchup to write his views on the table reflecting on the bad service he'd received.
Bradley, an advocate for humanity in business and differentiation through service, encouraged personal touches and random acts of kindness from public-facing retail employees. He added, however, that the language used to describe these staff conjured images of soldiers at war; phrases such as 'on the front line', 'at the sharp end' or 'at the coal face' are not helpful in motivating staff.
He encouraged the audience to push customer service to the top of the agenda - to make it a fundamental core activity, to remove their blinkers and to put on the customers' shoes.
Michael Green, Chief Executive of BCSC, comments:
"Good customer service is paramount to BCSC's ideology. In Britain, opportunities for creating better community links are being missed through mediocre service and poor attitudes towards customers. In 2005, BCSC called for the creation of a new national standard of customer service competence across the retail industry as a contributing factor to its long-term improvement. BCSC continues to support and promote this objective via its dedicated Customer Service Committee and events such as this lunch."
Bradley said:
"We need to aspire to give our customers the best possible experience - by either making their retail experience easy and enjoyable, or by putting right a problem they have had. There are already some examples of this, but they are few and far between. Putting the right people in the right roles and empowering and motivating them is a good place to start. Customer satisfaction is not enough; we need to be delighting our customers if we want to keep them."
Mark Bradley
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