Tag Archives: United Kingdom

The Worst British Customer Experiences of 2024

The Worst British Customer Experiences of 2024

by Braden Kelley

Every year The Guardian, a newspaper in the United Kingdom (UK) looks not just at companies delivering stellar customer service, but APPALLING customer service as well.

In this article we’ll look at some of the organizations they highlighted in their latest iteration and what we can learn from them.

In looking at the article, the first thing that jumps out – primarily from the tongue in cheek approach of the author – is that many customer service mishaps come from employees following rules instead of sensibilities.

From pensioners being denied their walking sticks, blind athletes being denied their service dogs, to academics writing the occasional book being denied auto insurance – when companies demand that their employees serve their rules more than they serve their customers, bad customer experiences follow.

Without further ado, here are the seven organizations rewarded, ahem honored, ahem shamed by the article:

1. Teachers Pensions, run by Capita (a Business Process Outsourcing firm (BPO)) earned the glorious honor of being the first organization celebrated for their dubious practices of regularly requiring recipients to confirm that they are not dead and to answer whether or not they have taken on a new lover.

2. U.K. Government launched a program to encourage homeowners to insulate their homes, but spray foam insulation (one of the options) when poorly installed can cause roofing materials to rot and for the home if it fails inspection to become illegal to sell until the homeowner pays to have the insulation removed.

3. Eurostar in their brilliance decided it was too dangerous for their employees to push personal wheelchairs any longer and neglected to tell customers booking assistance of this change, leaving them stranded on the station concourse unless they had paid for a companion to travel with them. Eurostar eventually changed this new policy after the Observer reported the issue to U.K. regulators.

4. British Airways landed on the list with two tales of woe, the most egregious being that of a passenger that was prevented from reaching her grandmother’s deathbed by preventing her from boarding, forcing her to buy a new ticket to fly the next day, and canceling her return flight for good measure. They finally provided compensation after the fact once presented with a lawyer’s opinion by the staff of The Guardian on behalf of the customer.

5. Sheffield Council towed a car, didn’t notify the owner, forgot they had it, and then when they discovered it in their impound yard a year later (badly degraded) they demanded the owner collect it in two days and paid storage fees of about $6,000 it would be destroyed. The owner had reported the car stolen, received an insurance settlement and the insurance company, as you might expect, wanted its money back when they learned of the situation.

6. Amazon showed up on their list because their employees (or agents) began engaging in a scam where one-time passwords (OTP) were said by delivery drivers not to be working and so they wouldn’t deliver the item, but then the item showed as delivered in Amazon’s systems and so people were being told there was nothing they could do because it looks like the customer received their product. Amazon finally relented in the case of the one customer in question when Guardian Money intervened.

7. Taylor Swift, administered by AXS, sold VIP ticket packages for more than $650 each that rewarded paying customers with seats behind the stage obstructed by equipment and a celebrity tent and upon complaining resulted in the customers being moved to the cheap seats way in the back that they could have purchased for a fraction of what they paid.

So, as you consistently look to maintain, or create, an excellent customer experience make sure you are minding the details (annual or quarterly independent experience audits can be a great way to do this).

One of the marketing clients I worked with always called the phone numbers, visited the URL’s and emailed any email addresses mentioned in any creative we designed for her at the agency because the one she didn’t when working with a different agency, a typo meant that the marketing materials in market ended up being the number of a phone sex line. The details matter.

It is important that you spend time in the field listening to employees about the real world impact of policies that might land differently than how they were envisioned. Also, managers should make sure they are properly training staff to understand the reasons why the company has certain policies and when they need to be flexible. The lifetime value of a customer is nearly always greater than the value of any individual transaction.

How important is it for your employees to understand that it is better to lose the battle to win the war?


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Stoke Your Innovation Bonfire Today

Stoke Your Innovation Bonfire Today

Did you know that if you buy a paper copy of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on Amazon, you can start reading it Amazon’s Kindle Cloud Reader today?

Well you can!

Pretty cool!

And if you prefer, you can just buy the Kindle version instead.

I’m not sure if this works in every country where Amazon has a presence, but it’s worth a try if you just can’t wait for a copy of the book to be delivered. Click the country link to go to the book’s page on that Amazon site:

Yes!

Who will be the first to review Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire on Amazon in China and Japan?

Or to invite me to speak there, for that matter. 😉


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Designing Innovation – Can Government Help?

Designing Innovation - Can Government Help?Can government help companies innovate, or do they tend to get in the way instead?

The answer is that often regulations tend to impede innovation and progress. Other key aspects of a country’s ability to innovate are the relative risk tolerance of its citizenry and whether it is culturally accepted to try and fail at something.

The United States leads the world in innovation because it has created the perfect storm of a risk tolerant citizenry, where failure is sometimes a badge of honor, and a government that invests in basic research, helps to commercialize it, and for the most part tends to go out of the way from a regulatory standpoint.

Other countries have looked to America with envy, often as some of their most innovative citizens were leaving to realize their visions in the New World. That is now starting to change, however. Some of the best and brightest are returning to their home countries from America and other governments are looking to replicate, or even improve upon, some of the factors that have led to success in America.

One of those countries is now Britain. Britain has been home to some phenomenal inventors over the past several centuries, but in the recent past the Brits have not been as successful at turning invention into innovation as the Americans. They are now working to change that.

When I was living there I saw several initiatives to spur innovation and new industries, and I also saw a growing innovative spirit. One of the top innovation agencies in the world, WhatIf?! (primary focus on product/service innovations), is located there and the country is full of design talent to go with its heritage of invention. This is allowing the creation of new global leaders like Dyson and Tesco with the right stuff to become leaders across the globe instead of only across Britain.

There is an interesting article on how Britain jumpstarts design (sorry, BusinessWeek unpublished it). America was the innovation leader in the last century. Who will be the innovation leader in this century? Will it be Britain, America, or someone else?

Who do you think it will be?

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