Why there's no substitute for face to face customer service - Bird Lovegod

Of course it was, because no one was there to remove it.

And it didn’t go off as she left the store, perhaps they made the security guys redundant as well? Being a dutiful son, I went to the branch to get the tag removed for her.

Apparently there have been ‘countless’ people coming into the store with the same issue. I took the jacket home, my mother emailed the retailer, and got a reply with grammatical errors throughout, and after a few back and forths, they agreed to send a £5 voucher.

From the retailer and customer’s perspective there’s so much wrong here. Firstly, homeware and clothing is just not suitable for self service. Anything with a security tag is not going to work, for obvious reasons. And what about the person buying six glasses?

These need individually wrapping in paper, not dropping in a plastic bag together. It seems like the retailer is trying to cut costs without considering the implications, reducing their service to the barest minimum.

Head office really needs to stop whatever they think they’re doing and have a long hard joined up look at it. You can tell what’s gone on here. All they can see is the savings. The knock on is an obliteration of service and a farce of security. It’s unworkable in practice, and whatever they think they will save in staff costs will be more than offset by theft and losses of customers who are highly sensitive to degeneration of what was a premium shopping outlet.

The outsourcing of the ‘customer service’ team to whatever country it now resides in is another obvious tell of desperate cost saving.

The email response was glaringly bad. If it had been written in Word it would have shown these errors, so why is the quality control of customer service so poor as to not even have that basic step taken? Could it be that the customer service team is now experiencing the blowback of the ill considered reductions in staff?

And so on. The relentless drive to make our daily lives as free from human interaction as possible by digitising everything continues. In this instance it solves no problem for the customer whatsoever. In theory it is beneficial to the business, enabling them to serve more people per hour for less staff costs.

For businesses where service is a strength, a differentiator, a competitive edge, a matter of reputation, the slash and burn attitude will utterly backfire.

One of the many other people complaining online about the same retailer mentioned they no longer give you a saucer when you buy a cup of tea. Such a small and trivial thing, you might think. But it tells a big story.

Someone worked out how much having saucers cost, and decided to save a few pounds by getting rid of them. Miserly scrimping at the expense of brand reputation. Don’t think the customers don’t notice. They have. And they are not impressed.

Bird Lovegod is an entrepreneur and Christian commentator