Poor service from large suppliers teaches John Tate a valuable holiday lesson.

September is upon us and the holiday season drawing to a close. In late July I went to South America for my holiday. My daughter is travelling in the region for nine months, and my wife and I decided to meet her there.

I left for Quito, the capital of Ecuador, on a Wednesday afternoon. As usual, the last few days before my departure were manic. So it was not good news on the Monday morning when my home broadband stopped working.

No broadband

I use BT and rang their helpline. After about an hour trying to get through to the right section of BT they carried out some remote diagnostic tests. These suggested that the fault might be outside my house. They could not get an engineer on site before I left and could not book appointments more than four days in advance. So they asked me to call on my return to book an engineer.

Thankfully I had a back up for my broadband – my mobile phone connected to my PC. It was much slower, but I managed to send and receive emails before my departure. On returning home on a Wednesday, my wife took on the challenge of booking the engineer. She rang their support desk and it appeared they had lost all records of my previous call. About two hours later they re-tested the lines, said it was not a BT fault, and informed us that a chargeable engineer wouldn’t be available to visit us for more than a month.

More calls, and my wife got an engineer booked for the Friday. The engineer didn’t turn up. My wife rang the help desk again. They had no record of the earlier call and the process started again for the third time. As I write this article, we await the arrival of the BT engineer – and I still have no broadband.

No cash

So back to the holiday, which was fine. That was until I tried to get some cash from a bank machine in Quito one evening. The machine just gobbled up my card. I rang the Nat West 24-hour helpline and they said it was a fault with the machine. My wife also has a debit card on the same account, so we rang Nat West to see if this would work and were told all would be fine. We used a machine from a different bank and – guess what – card number two was also gobbled up.

By now it was 7pm, local time. We rang the bank again and they said there was nothing they could do to help us – unless we came back to the UK. They said they had no facility for us to draw money out of our account via any bank in Ecuador.

Thankfully I had taken some spare UK sterling with me and my daughter had access to some cash, so we muddled through the rest of the holiday. If I hadn’t had this back up I would have been really stuck.

Twenty-first century technology should make it easier to provide customer service. With email available 24/7, and communications to remote staff – bankers and engineers in my case – relatively straightforward, how can two of the biggest companies in their field provide such poor service? Both of the situations above irritated me.

Both were examples of big companies delivering a lousy service. Nat West, which is owned by RBS, is one of the world’s largest banks. BT is a telecoms giant – interestingly with a large IT consulting services team.

Unfortunately these organisations are not alone. It is hard, maybe even impossible, to find another bank or telecoms company that actually delivers a good service.

Barriers to entry in these fields are high. So the competitive pressure to do a good job is limited. The focus on profit is clearly at the expense of customer service.

So what can we do about this? We are unlikely to change the behaviour of a large supplier individually. However, making sure we spread the message about a bad – or great – experience is at least good for the soul.

So we need to make sure we have a rigorous back-up plan. In my case it was an alternative to my broadband connection and holding some actual cash, rather than debit cards. Where the opportunity exists to use a smaller supplier, perhaps the case for ‘small is beautiful’ is a strong one. At least until the bigger players get their act together.

John Tate is MD of ChangeBASE, IT adviser to the CFDG and a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School