Why are businesses still treating customers badly?

So we’re having dinner at a friend’s house and we get onto the subject of customer service. Specifically, the lack of it, and how, if you want to sort out a problem, you have to have a tantrum or nobody pays any attention. (This is exactly what one of the guests did in the reception area of a factory in Cleveland after she demanded money back for a malfunctioning kettle that nearly burnt down the res in which her son was staying. They told her that the accounting system would not allow them to refund her; eventually one of the staff appeared with R79,50 in cash — probably just to get rid of her.)

Then there was the tale of how she sorted out a problem with MWeb — she had asked for access to be stopped after the bill reached R800; they allowed it to get to R2 000 and then cited an obscure clause in the contract which, they said absolved them of responsibility — after she managed to get through to the managing director’s PA. They gave her a free Gig of data.

I told my story of how I had to speak to eight different call centre staff at ANZ before I could get a faxed copy of a provisional bank statement (they won’t email a statement as email is “not secure”, a problem that, oddly enough, doesn’t crop up when one applies to have one’s statements emailed to one instead of being posted. Ah well, corporate logic.). One of them was brilliant, one very good, and the other six were useless. The first person I spoke to after getting through — I hate to think how much I spent on overseas calls that day — reminded me so strongly of Carol Beer, the “compu’er says no” woman on Little Britain, that I half expected her to cough down the line from Melbourne.

There, as in South Africa, the solution to a problem they can’t be arsed to solve is to pass you through to somebody else, who then passes you back to the same call centre you called in the first place, who puts you on hold while a disembodied voice tells you, in a vaguely Australian twang, that “your time is important to us”, and so it goes ad infinitum, a terrible telephonic tag of Sisyphean dimensions.

Another of my dinner companions recalled how he was standing in the enquiries queue at Nedbank in Sandton City when he overheard the man in front of him complain that the ATM had swallowed his card. The bank staff said they would give him a new one, but it would cost him R50. “No it won’t,” he said, and asked for the forms to close his account. You’d think, at this point, that a manager would be called to resolve the issue. What did they do? They brought him the forms so he could close the account.

In the midst of a recession, you’d think that businesses would pay more loving attention to their customers, and show more enthusiasm for those who express interest in forking over money for their products and services. But I have been staggered by the indifference I have encountered over the past month. You expect the odd cashier to ignore you as she swipes your purchases, that’s par for the course. But the uselessness is pervasive and extends into brands you would imagine to be associated with treating customers like human beings with feelings. The Investec personal banker my husband phoned — twice — after being referred by a friend, couldn’t be bothered to email any information, let alone return a call; my replacement Clicks credit card still hasn’t been delivered two weeks after I called them and reminded them my current card was about to expire (you’d think they’d quite like me to spend money on it); car salesmen never phoned back (you’d think they would be desperate); ADT took 10 days to send a consultant to sort out our new contract after we moved, during which time we weren’t covered, but were still paying.

The one guy who did go the extra mile, the nice young BMW salesman who’d just moved out from Greece to be with his South African girlfriend, got fired by his manager midway through the deal.

There have been bright spots — my husband encountered especially good service from a bright young woman at the Standard Bank branch in the Bryanston Shopping Centre — but far too few of them. Businesses seem to have forgotten that without customers, they are dead in the water. And in tough times, customers have more power. Or should have more power.

It’s time we punished poor service. Businesses that treat customers badly deserve to go out of business.