Eclectica

Mostly cogent, most of the time.

The customer conundrum

A few decades ago my dad was standing on a railway platform and heard an announcement on the tannoy apologising to ‘customers’ for a delay. This was in the early days of privatised rail, and the use of the word shocked him. He wasn’t a customer, he insisted, he was a passenger. ‘Passengers are for transportation,’ he told me. ‘Customers are for exploitation.’

He may have not wanted to accept it, but whether he liked it or not he was a customer now, as we’ve all become. But in the age when so many services which used to be state owned are becoming privately owned, at least in part, where should the line between customer and passenger be drawn?

My wife and I are in the process of assessing local schools in order to whittle down a list of three for our daughter’s primary school application. In its literature, one of the schools referred to parents as ‘customers’. But how are we that? Does the fact that we have a choice, albeit very limited and possibly illusory, of which school to send our child to make us customers of the school itself, consumers of its ‘product’? I would argue not, but you can see how it may be considered a grey area.

The problem is a semantic one, to an extent. We talk about services being customer-facing or customer-focused, and these are positive and valuable things for a service to be. The terms conjure up a sense that the service provider is accessible to the public, willing to listen, considerate of the public’s needs.

But how many companies can you name which really, truly embody those values? We all know that customer service representatives and customer feedback phone operatives exist and are nominally tasked to deal with us in a friendly, helpful way. But how many of them actually do? How many are, instead, confused, confusing, willfully obdurate, unhelpful, tiresome or just too stupid or plain indifferent to even pretend to give the most cursory of tosses.

We know the values that customer-facing and customer-focused are supposed to embody; but equally, we understand what they really represent in practice, and that is a urgent desire to get rid of the customer as fast as humanly possible and go back to playing solitaire.

The other day I was in a meeting at a public body where customer service was under discussion and I piped up.

“I know it’s semantic and annoying, and I know it smacks of the kind of PC bollocks that drives us all mad, but can I suggest we ban the word ‘customer’ from the discussion?”

A few eyes rolled.

“Thing is, you’re not a commercial entity, you’re a public body. Your relationship with the people who contact you isn’t customer/corporation.”

“So what do you think we should call them?” someone asked wearily.

“I know they sound naff, but either citizen or voter,” I replied.

The room considered, took it on board, and people tried it out. Within twenty minutes we were back to ‘customer’ and I stayed schtum.

The language of the private sector, while easy for everyone to understand, and accurately describing the principles of the role under discussion, can lead us up the garden path.

We may aspire to the supposed principles of the commercial sector’s sham of customer service, but if we start referring to the parents of our schoolchildren as customers we will start, in practice, consciously or unconsciously, to ape their treatment of the customer as well. It’s inevitable. Monkey see, monkey do.

After all, as any fule kno, pupils are for education, but customers are for exploitation.