The blog post Why I don’t write about customer service sets out my problems with the general concept of “customer service”: the fact that it doesn’t deal with the biggest problems in the relationship between people and businesses. By way of illustration, it starts with a story about a friend and I using the weighing machines at the central Oxford branch of Boots.
I explain in the blog post that my friend and I paid for the service where you get your weight and body fat measured, but the body fat gadget was broken and my friend wasted her money. (The machine didn’t give change.) We were irritated because there were no signs telling us that the gadget was broken.
So I wrote to Boots asking for better signage, machines that give change and more staff in the store. They treated it as a customer service issue, which it wasn’t. They kept bringing the focus back to an individual member of staff, who had very little to do with it. My main problem was with a machine and with the way the store is run, not with any of the humans who work in the store. If you’re interested in the details, you can read the whole thing.
The broken-machine incident was on Shrove Tuesday 2010. So, shortly before Shrove Tuesday 2013 (a week or so ago), I thought I would try to use exactly the same weighing machine and see what happened.
As before, it was charging 50p to measure your weight, plus an extra 20p to measure your body fat. So I put in a 50p piece and a 20p piece.
Guess what? The body fat gadget turned out to be broken, but – guess what? - there was no sign letting customers know about this. And guess what else? The machine still doesn’t give change, so I wasted my 20p. And all the staff I could see were rushed off their feet, so I didn’t bother trying to tell any of them.
In other words, none of the things I was complaining about – the broken gadget, the lack of signage, the lack of change, the understaffing – have changed in the three years since I complained to Boots originally.
This shouldn’t be surprising, but I was a bit surprised. I felt like a knight who’s returned from a three-year quest to find the damsel really did stay true to him. Every exquisite detail of the original Boots fail was lovingly preserved by broken systems and a focus on “customer service” rather than fixing real problems.
I’m assuming the machine hasn’t been broken for the entire time. My guess is that these machines have a propensity to break frequently, which isn’t much of a problem for Boots because users don’t know they’re broken and they carry on putting money in which they can’t get back without going through a lot of hassle. Then occasionally (I’m still guessing), someone like me makes a fuss for the principle of the thing, and then they get the machine repaired, and it works for a bit, and then breaks again. But you know what definitely has been broken for the entire time? The concept of “customer service”.