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In her weekly column for the Guardian, Anna Tims solves readers consumer problems – ranging from the devastating to the ridiculous. She’s online now to answer your questions and share her wisdom
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Somersetlass asks: Hi Anna. Thanks for all your work helping people deal with awful situations. With so many poor examples of customer service out there, are there any companies or organisations you’ve dealt with which use real people rather than AI and who actually listen?
Anna: Thank you for your thank you! If you mean companies I’ve dealt with professionally, there was a now defunct utilities company who offered a reader a spa day to help her recover from the stress its blunderings had caused her. Bagcraft, a luggage store in Essex is a stand-out. A customer had ordered two suitcases for a New Year’s holiday. One of them arrived from the manufacturer with a fault. The store owner reordered it and, worried that it would not reach the customer in time, set off the day after Boxing Day on a 820 mile round trip to deliver the cases in person.
Readers often write in to praise Le Creuset for its no-quibble lifetime guarantee which has resurrected the most ancient of steelware. And speaking as a customer, I was amazed when the online plant supplier Primrose informed me that part of my order was unavailable, sent a generous voucher unbidden as an apology and answered my subsequent questions about suitable alternative plants with prompt, personalised responses. And no, they didn’t know I was a journalist!
Anna: All these things already exist. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 combined various laws from various eras into a single framework which strengthens consumer protection. Regulators such as Ofgem and the CMA, are supposed to monitor customer service in their sector and enforce the law, council trading standards departments were set up to protect consumers from dodgy operators, ombudsman and dispute resolution schemes can step in when a customer can’t get a complaint resolved and county court offer an inexpensive legal route to redress.
The problem is funding and staffing. All these bodies are overstretched and, in some cases, underactive, but that’s not to say that they have contributed to important reforms along the way.