I’ve just read the latest copy of TimeOut which had a breakdown on London’s worst services. It provides a list of key touch points where the customer experience has been forgotten. It made me think about bad service experiences I’ve recently had including: being kept on hold and experiencing really bad customer communications by BT. Waiting for one hour in a local Shoreditch restaurant to find out they had lost the food order. Both of which were dealt with extremely badly, both could of simply been improved with a very simple verbal check-back interaction.
What bad service experiences have you experienced and what feedback would you give the organisation to make things better?
Sep 3rd, Alice said:
I recently went to a well known italian restraunt near oxford street. Its always a nightmare looking for somewhere to eat around that area because its full of tourists and i dont really think that a good service is the top of their agenda, just getting us in the door is. The waitress was unfriendly, the wine was definatly corked, and she gave us the bill before we had asked for it.
All she needed was to be friendlier, a smile or maybe 2, atleast when we paid! A simple ‘is everything ok’. I haave worked very long hours as a waitress and smiling is definatly one of the easiest things to do!
Oct 19th, Helen Evans said:
Hello, I saw this post and wanted to respond. I work on a local social search based site based in London called welovelocal.com, it focuses on the very issue that you mention. We provide a business listing service with the additional feature of reviews. People can write freely about the experiences that they have had in local services or shops.
Essentially, people can read other people’s reviews, it takes word of mouth on line. You can read reviews from other people in your local area, getting review from people you can trust.
The site offers an area for business to respond to such comments, and act upon the recommendations made. This aims to solve the problem that bad service goes unnoticed because there is nowhere out there to get your voice heard.