Picture from Badge Collectors Circle

I have always been a stickler for good customer service and think it is prudent to kick up a polite but dissatisfied fuss if you are less than happy with your experience; it could be a bad meal, a flat pint, or simply indifference and inattentiveness from the staff, not that I expect a red carpet but a smile and a thank you would be nice. The most effective way of doing this is to ask for an audience with the manager, just asking usually puts the willies up the staff member sufficiently enough to rectify the problem. If this doesn’t work then the good old fashioned letter of complaint in the post is the correct etiquette, sometimes you receive a reply although you must be prepared for the fact that your letter might end up being filed away in the office waste paper basket. You may not be too surprised to learn that I have written a lot of letters to heads of departments in my life, the results are varied.

The hotel in Brighton that ruined our short break away last year still hasn’t been in touch to respond to the letter I wrote complaining about their attitude and my request that they refund the money I had to spend on unscheduled tickets from Brighton to London and London to Nottingham having spent roughly an hour by the sea. This reminds me; National Express never responded when I wrote to them suggesting that the recorded greeting/safety advice message that they play on coaches should immediately be followed by the song ‘National Express’ by The Divine Comedy.

When I lived in Southend-On-Sea I used to take Emily for breakfast at the BHS café (until I discovered the Pyewacket – best breakfast in Southend if not Essex) and I noticed that standards fluctuated wildly depending on the staff on duty. One of their tricks was to give you more baked beans than necessary to create the illusion of a full plate which was then joined by the rest of the food. On several occasions the bacon would be too thin, the sausages dry, and the egg rock hard. There was an older lady called Dot who served a more generous breakfast and ditched the hot plate warm ups to sell fresh food from the kitchen, so breakfast was always nicer when she was on thanks to her maverick approach. I wrote to the branch (writing a letter was more common even in the early 2000s as a lot of businesses were yet to ‘get the Internet’ or be ‘on e-mail’ back when email was a hyphenated word) to complain about the quality of the breakfast but singled Dot out for praise. Next time I went in with Emily in the pushchair Dot gave us a free breakfast. I never found out how she knew it was me that wrote the letter, but she had obviously received a pat on the back from her boss. Sainsbury’s on the other hand, made no effort to apologise for the despicable behaviour of its two staff members when I wrote to them about this incident.

Although I never heard back from Golden Wonder regarding Tangy Toms, I am pleased today to report that waiting for me when I arrived home from court yesterday evening was a letter from Cadbury’s. Mandi is a lifelong fan of the character Bertie Bassett and collects items of merchandise carrying his image. For Christmas she received several boxes of liquorice allsorts including a presentation Bertie containing sweets inside that I bought for her. One of the trademarks of Bassett’s allsorts is that each bag contains one Bertie sweet, yet over the whole haul of sweets bought for her over the festive period she found only one. On her behalf I wrote to the customer service address on the box expressing Mandi’s disappointment, pointing out her loyalty to the brand that goes back to her childhood spent sleeping under a Bertie Bassett quilt cover. This was a few weeks ago and I had naturally assumed that Mr. Bassett simply didn’t give a tuppenny hoot about the lack of Berties within their sweets. The letter they sent to me in return was apologetic in tone but I did feel that they were humouring me somewhat. It was pointed out to me that the assortment of units in this product is completely random. The units are made and mixed together in large drums where they are then deposited either into bags or boxes depending on the pack size. It is not possible therefore to guarantee the number of each unit in any one pack. The process is designed to ensure that all units are present in the bag but, occasionally, due to the manufacturing mixing process, it is possible for a bag to be packed without a particular unit.

I am going to overlook the fact that they referred to sweets as ‘units’. This is a sad sign of the corporate time we live in and I’m sure that when Bassett’s was Bassett’s and not one company under a sweet making umbrella (along with Maynard’s, Halls, Trebor, Trident, and Natural Confectionary Co.) nobody would have called them units. That aside, I do think that this is a bit of a cop out as far as tackling the problem is concerned, surely they could employ someone to stand there chucking a Bertie into each bag/box to see that this tradition is upheld. Standards have fallen and it is because nobody complained before. Having said that, it was nice of them to write back.

On a plus side, they did enclose a voucher worth two pounds to spend on sweets. We were hoping that a kind hearted boss would take pity on Mandi’s plight and send a bag containing just Bertie sweets, but it’s the gesture that counts.

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February housekeeping

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