TICKLING FEET OF CLAY

Peter Lederer used to be Chairman of Gleneagles and was the most impressive thinker about customer service I’ve known. He described the circle of doom in which however hard you try to make amends to a discontented customer you manage to make it worse. You know the sort of thing …the waiter carrying the complimentary glass of champagne to Mrs Grumble trips up and soaks her.

I think it’s what used to be call the feminine argument…”and another thing” - because it seems true that when one thing goes wrong the victim becomes a Victor Meldrew list-maker of errors - “typical, just typical”.

My feet of clay award goes to the John Lewis Partnership. The organisation is one I admire and Charlie Mayfield is the most impressive CEO I know. I once made an observation to him about something Waitrose had done which struck me as wrong. He replied carefully, courteously and signed it. Brilliant stuff.

Recently Waitrose, my Waitrose has been unable to put a foot right. I got rotten, stinking asparagus twice and was a sent a rotten response by Customer Service Bracknell (“Thanks for letting us know that one of our products was not of the standard you expected”- no the standard of reeking rottenness was well below par!) I bought some tea and most of the bags were split (Twining’s fault but I blamed Waitrose); Mr Sheen no longer stocked (black mark); they never bother to replenish the cups of green charity vouchers at check-out (meanies - don’t care about charity); a chicken on sale on August 29th with a sell-by-date of August 23rd. I told them to remove it from sale and they looked at me as though I were a troublemaker (which is just what I’d become). And the guy at checkout was sullen and unhelpful.

John Lewis Oxford Street fared just as badly. I queued 20 minutes for coffee because the 4th floor café was understaffed); the queues were worse and impenetrably slowed down by the jolly conversation of the staff in Greeting Cards and, finally, an American shopper in household appliances who was puce in the face screeched her outraged complaints with ripe language for being ignored.

These unrelated incidents do not constitute a case for the prosecution. The organisation is great and does most of what it does brilliantly.  But I wonder if I’m getting a preview of incipient problems.

Lucy Kellaway wrote about the customer revolution recently:

“At Amazon, the customer wins — and the employee does not. The company may not have chosen the most morally acceptable trade-off. But it has laid bare this fact of economic life: when some win, others lose.”

At John Lewis the employees are partners and have a lot of power. I wonder if the smell of complacency and a slowdown in the mission to improve is what I’m detecting. I wonder if others are sharing my missing of delight in the place.

But unless this welling rage goes I’m going to have to shop elsewhere.