Last rant of the year

What’s the use of doing a kindness, if you do it a day too late.

Customer service. How hard is it to just do the right thing by customers?

I have a couple of stories to share on the topic. Two annoyingly rubbish service ones, and one, well, where they just did the right thing.

A friend sold an item on Vinted, the online-second-hand outlet. She popped the parcel into the local courier’s locker, closed the door then went to get the receipt and the screen went blank. So she’s left with a parcel that she can’t get back, and no proof that she has posted it. InPost are ‘assessing the claim’, and could take anything up to 28 days to do so.

I sent my god-daughter’s birthday present off via Evri next-day delivery. That was my first mistake, but you can’t park anywhere near the Post Offices close to the office, so Evri, via the InPost locker at the petrol station seemed the best bet. According to the tracking on InPost, Evri have collected it. According to Evri, it’s still n the locker. That was a  month ago. Very occasionally, if you ring the helpline number during working hours, you might get a real human being to speak to. I suspect they only ever answer the phone just to strop that annoying ringing sound. Otherwise you get ‘Claire’, the jolly-sounding customer service rep. I’ll eat my Christmas Cracker hat with cranberry sauce if ‘Claire’ is anything other than an AI-bot.

The claims form for a lost parcel being duly completed, I’m told that it will be ‘assessed’, not decided, not refunded, not agreed, but ‘assessed’, in 20 working days. WORKING days. That’s nearly six weeks. It might only be £25 I’m claiming, and I could (did) buy my god-daughter another gift. But it wasn’t then in time for her 18^th birthday, and that’s what ticks me off so much. Note to self: lesson learned. Walk to the damn Post Office in future.

Then, we have Timpson’s. Lovely, philanthropic, family-owned, family-run Timpson’s. When my husband took his shoes in for restitching, he was told they’d need to be sent away and would be back within four weeks. Four weeks later and they aren’t back. “Leave it with me, and I’ll find out,” said the nice man at the branch in the shopping centre. By the time he’d got home, husband had received an email from Timpson’s customer service department, apologising for the fact that he was given incorrect information – it should have been six weeks, not four – in the first place. An email from a named individual, enclosing some gift vouchers to apologise for the inconvenience, and the fact that the service wasn’t up to scratch. Not only was it a proper named email address, but it also included her phone number in case he needed any more details. Thank you, Vicky, ‘part of the Timpson’s family since 2021’, you’ve exceeded expectations.

I know that there are lots of merchants and manufacturers who do take this looking after customers ethic to heart, whose customer service does go above and beyond. But there are also plenty who just pay it lip service.

In this season of goodwill, can’t we all just try and remember to Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By?

Thanks to all of you who’ve bothered to get to the end another one of my rambling pieces. And thanks also, to those of you who are kind enough to read and comment favourably when I spill the contents of my jumbled brain onto this blog. Bearing in mind what’s going on in the world, there’ll be plenty of ranting to come in 2025.

I’m off to wrap some presents, sing some carols and eat my own body weight in mince-pies.

Merry Christmas