Devil's Advocate: Customer service - an oxymoron?

After resolving a longstanding dispute with an online grocer, Martin Brampton wonders whether either IT or the business ever spares a thought for the customer.

It is lucky that we still have a few legal rights left to us as consumers. You may recall my problems with getting a few groceries delivered. While 'customer services' declined to help, we eventually achieved a solution of a kind.

To recap, some months ago, our internet order for groceries from a gigantic supermarket chain went badly awry. Amazingly, the largest company in the sector apparently has no fallback arrangements for handling printer failure. Our consignment arrived without proper documentation and short of a number of items.

By telephone, the customer services department expressed the usual sorrow over our predicament but each time denied all previous contacts. Complaints by letter fared no better, as we were told that not only was there no record of our telephone calls, there was no record of us ever placing an order. When we questioned this, the unctuous prose turned quite aggressive as we were told that our concerns had been recorded.

Well, the missing items were not worth a huge amount but the principle rankled. And there was another route to solving the problem. As it happens, we had an account with the supermarket in question with funds transferred monthly from our bank account, and removed again as we made purchases.

So I wrote to the department handling the account, asking about the money removed on the day of our problems. After a delay, they replied with a till receipt and details of a delivery. The till receipt was signed by a person with the name 'Dot Com'. The delivery turned out to be one coincidentally made to my father on the same day but unsurprisingly for a different amount.

The discrepancy was pointed out, and it was emphasised that we had definitely not visited the store on the day in question and that 'Dot Com' is not the way we sign our names. It took a number more weeks and a reminder that money cannot be taken from accounts without reason to eventually win the concession that there was no adequate record of the transaction.

So finally the accounts people working for the supermarket were obliged to refund the payment in full, based on the company's own denial that we had placed an internet order and the complete absence of a genuine signature on a till receipt. I might have felt guilty about getting a full refund when only some items were missing but by this time had been so greatly inconvenienced that it seemed the least I deserved.

What can we conclude from all this? The most general point to be made is that hubris is an ever present hazard. It seems that companies that achieve pre-eminence in their sector often fail to keep it for very long. They come to believe so firmly in their own superiority that no amount of evidence is enough to raise a question. This inevitably rubs off on the customers in a negative way.

More specifically, one might well conclude that customer services departments are a liability if they forever shy away from any real issue or take offence at being questioned. Since our solution was only wrung out of the company by sustained pressure, we have not hesitated to change our habits and buy our groceries somewhere else.

At a detailed level, it seems reasonable to suggest that someone investigate standby arrangements for broken printers. And perhaps some IT people somewhere might want to work out how an order can be handled yet leave no trace. But nowadays these seem to be excessively prosaic matters for the high flying executive or even the customer services department to worry about.