Utter this phrase to have your customer service problems fixed instantly

Are You Being Served? was a marvellous show, and not just for the wonderful delivery of double entendres from the late John Inman.

Even for me at a young age, I was struck that shoppers at Grace Brothers were treated to an exceptional level of customer service that didn’t seem to match anything I’d seen. The only department store in my home town was a Co-op where I couldn’t ever recall having three members of staff in menswear attending to my father’s fashion whims.

But in the Sixties and earlier, my father’s generation tells me, customer service was very different.

While it could be dismissed as a rose-tinted view, much has genuinely changed in the corner store and village bank branch.

Over decades companies have fought to increase their productivity and lower their costs. In reality, that means fewer staff behind the till. More recently, it can even mean no staff behind the till, amid the grating whine of “unexpected item in bagging area”.

We benefit from lower prices, the companies tell us.

Yes, we heartily welcome lower prices, but at what cost?

Consider energy suppliers. Regular readers of Telegraph Money’s weekend sections and website will be fully aware of the issues. It provides a great modern story of industrial-scale customer service failure.

Our postbag and in-box bulge with complaints. Npower has been the worst offender. But now even challenger firms are running into trouble. Ovo Energy recently admitted to botching 13,000 bills.

So why so many problems? Some of the suppliers blame the draconian rules piled on them. Well-intentioned regulators want to break the stranglehold of the big six firms but at the same time curtail new entrants. To keep up with some of these rules the energy companies have overhauled IT systems, which has sparked billing errors.

But perhaps there is more to it than just regulatory interference. The energy industry may have run into a similar customer service nightmare that blighted the banks a decade ago – and maybe for the same reason.

The reason banks saw a rise in customer service complaints – largely about account transfers and basic account management – seemed pretty simple to me. The rise of price comparison websites meant it became infinitely easier and cheaper for the banks to go and “buy” new customers rather than invest in customer service to keep the existing ones happy.

Has the energy industry become locked in the same cycle? The suppliers have become intensely focused on price. Rightly so, you may say. But what it means is that when you take a cheap loss-making tariff, there’s arguably a greater chance you’ll encounter customer service issues.

A recent drop below £1,000 for the best tariffs for a typical household was welcomed. But Oink Energy, a relatively new service-focused firm, tells me anything below £1,000 means losses for the supplier. When you’ve had enough and leave, the cut-price supplier just buys more customers again.

Banks and building societies, while not perfect, have improved. Now they prefer to keep customers, be it with good customer service or bumper benefits.

The codeword

Energy firms should learn from this. Until the market changes for the better, customers can rely on something the regulator has handed them. The new mantra among these watchdogs is that companies – bank or energy company – should always “treat customers fairly”.

It sounds like a throwaway diktat, but a contact of mine within the financial industry picked up on this and has been using it to great effect. Every time he hits on a customer service problem he clears his throat and states he is “not being treated fairly”. The issue is immediately escalated and fixed. Until the energy market is fixed, that’s one tool that might help.

• andrew.oxlade@telegraph.co.uk

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