Tag: Retail
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Just Checking the Smellprint
I’m getting nostalgic for Brexit. This whole corona-clown cluster is withing touching distance of peak buffoonery. Helpfully though, because anti-inflammatories suppress the immune system, we have been advised not to be taking ibuprofen. That’s a relief. Mind you, it takes a Kofi-Annan-grade negotiation just to but a few packets under normal trading conditions, so it’s…
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Let’s Get (Insert Here) Done
Another day, another period of torment as a citizen of the UK. Following yet another terrorist attack committed by a released offender, the fingers are once again being pointed by people who haven’t yet realised that delayed release would only have meant a delayed attack. For a solution to the problem, I could just draw…
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A World of Pure Imagination
I think and talk about the declining service industry a lot. Probably too much, in fact. The public looks down their haughty noses at service providers; organisations themselves see it as a necessary evil but underfund it as a form of passive-aggressive lip-service. A way to block, frustrate and demoralise customers into giving up. In…
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Good Moaning…
We’re not really complainers, here in the UK. Now I can understand that as we are very British. Polite and nobody wants to cause a scene. We have also never really got to grips with the concept of service. For me though, it is the abject hopelessness of complaints processes that pulls my proverbial chain.…
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Chug-a-Lug Along With Me…
Chugging – or charity mugging if you’d like me to get etymological (it’s a portmanteau of “charity” and “mugger’) – is back in the ascendancy. Skanky old meth addicts (well, that’s how they seem and behave) who steal eye contact and then (a few zany dance moves later) have moonwalked into your path with a cheeky…
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The Bitterest Pill…
Running a little low on painkillers the other day for the family medicine cupboard, I thought I’d procure a few packets of ibuprofen and paracetamol. As you can buy a packet of 16 for about £0.35, a couple of quid would see the Frances household ok. So, a visit to the shop and 6 packets…
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Service, Please…
Black Friday will shortly have been and gone, so brace yourself for more sales analysis and the inevitable laments about the demise of in-store retail. With a foam finger-sized finger being decisively directed at online. Er, no. Online is just another channel. Now I am no fan of contact centres, but they made the transition…
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Levelling on Service
Back in the not so glorious days of the outsourced contact centre boom, we all had one objective in our crosshairs. And that was hitting the SLA. There was largely one channel (telephone) and an essential part of service meant that you picked up the call and did so quickly. Failing to pick up would…
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