I have been toying with this idea for a while: reviews good and bad of companies and services, which to embrace and which to avoid. They include small local businesses and mega corporations such as the utility companies and range from the truly excellent to the disappointing, from the wholly incompetent to the wilfully criminal.
I am hoping that the owners of the excellent ratings website Trustpilot have not somehow copyrighted “pilot” as a suffix and have also checked that the logo above which I devised has not been used elsewhere.
I am not in general a leaver of bad reviews, only positive ones, unless a company has been truly shocking and has done nothing to redress problems. Bad reviews can do a lot of damage, they are sometimes just malicious and as someone who runs small businesses myself I am all too aware of their importance in these days of social media. I would certainly not ever want to inflict harm on, for example, a struggling local pub just because of one disappointing meal. Nor do I intend, with one or two exceptions, to take a swipe at employees, the ones on the ground or at the coalface, the ones who actually do the work, it’s the corporate jargon spouting middle and senior management to which I apportion blame. If I am writing about courier companies, for example, I am not criticising the drivers, the actual couriers who in my experience are mostly wonderful under extremely stressful and oppressive employment conditions, rather the systems and in some cases total lack of customer service, especially when things go wrong.
Capitalism gone wrong – large firms like most of the banks, cutting services without reducing costs, but effectively charging their customers more in terms of our time. Increasingly, we have to do more of their work for them. Cutting staff so that we have to deal with those dreadful, endless telephone menus, or worse still the chatbots and their vicious circle attempts at conversation. Insurers who will do literally anything (including in one case, a conspiracy to commit fraud, threats and outright lies) to avoid or reduce a payout on a claim and in particular British Gas who have shown utter contempt not only for my business but also the law and even our local MP, the malpractices, untruths and machinations of certain white goods high street retailers, understaffed and underfunded government institutions and departments, these are some of my villains.
For a local and positive start I would single out
Thatcham & Hungerford Jewellers | (thatchamjewellers.co.uk)
I am not a frequenter of jewellers much, but I have in the past tended to find that they can be rather snooty, the type to judge by appearances: “We only deal with silver here”, before they even know what has been brought in. “Oh, it is silver.” This though, on, Hungerford High Street, is the opposite of that. They are friendly and polite and no repair job is too small. On one occasion I tried to pay them more than the £5 or so they asked for a watch battery replacement but they put the extra into a charity box. They take time and care and give thoughtful advice no matter how minor the eventual purchase.
Also based in Hungerford, we have been taking our cars here for at least twenty years, both under its current ownership and that of Simon’s predecessor when it was Ben’s Garage. I should confess a tangential family connection here, but it is relatively recent and does not influence me. They are, to a fault, honest, friendly, extremely reasonably priced and really, really good at what they do. The single brand big dealerships do not fare well in comparison, being a dodgy shyster often seemingly being the main qualification for employment and management there. I have only ever bought one brand new car and within weeks something had gone seriously wrong. “We can fix it but it will cost you £6,000” they said. What did I want them to do. “Give me another car.” Pause for thought. “Well, it’s still £6,000.” “£6,000, really?” “Well, all right, £600 then.” From another one-brand merchant we have paid for work and collected the car only to find that it simply hadn’t been undertaken at all. I suppose much of the point of this entire post is to recommend using small, local businesses with a friendly face and the human touch whenever possible.
This may seem a surprising and hypocritical recommendation given what I have just written. I deplore the way their employees are apparently treated but the customer service is just too good. I shop with them a lot. It’s not just the prices and insanely speedy delivery. I have never, not once, had a problem returning something to them, no matter for what reason and no matter how old the purchase. If there is a stumbling block, all you have to do is press a button and they call you and hey presto, you are pretty quickly talking to an actual human being. They are not perfect. I would never buy memory in the form of SD cards, USB sticks or for the most part external hard drives from them – there are far too many fakes on the site at prices which are unrealistically cheap. They are slow to fix these things in terms of taking them down altogether. Not laptops either – one generic description is used to cover raft of different models so you don’t know what you’re actually going to get. But the convenience of it all and the absolute dedication to customer service win me over completely. The big high street retailers, of which more below, have only themselves to blame for what will presumably be their ultimate demise.
Currys | Washing Machines, Laptops, TVs, Consoles
This is a very strange company indeed, divided into two and never the twain shall meet. The online and retail park businesses seem to be entirely separate and at war with each other. Certainly they are not permitted to communicate with one another. My experiences buying from them online have been pretty much fine (the service is ok, returns not a problem), but the retail park versions are something else again. I won’t use them at all now in either form, just on principle (Argos is fine for the online side). They are, for a start, a classic example of a company which fails to follow that most basic of rules – treat your staff well. If your staff are happy, are properly trained and have a sense of purpose, in all likelihood your customers will end up happy too. Here though, they mostly just seemed miserable. I once went into the Newbury branch and counted eighteen members of staff hanging around and either chatting to each other or doing nothing at all, while the poor guy on the help desk was having to deal single-handedly with an every-growing queue of irate consumers.
I once bought a Miele vacuum cleaner from them. It was absurdly underpowered and not fit for purpose – I was constantly bending down to pick up by hand everything it had missed. I took it back and told them so. They asked me to leave it with them so that they could test it, which I did. I went back when I had time about a week later. The machine was still sitting behind the counter. A very large man came storming out, shouting and gesticulating threateningly. “So it’s you who’s left this here all this time for us to keep tripping over. It isn’t broken, it is working fine.” “I didn’t say it was faulty, I said it wasn’t fit for purpose.” I got my money back – eventually.
Currys actually took the site over from another white goods and electrical retailer called Tempo which went bust not long after my dispute with them. I had had a history of very unhappy experiences with washing machines. One of them was made by Zanussi and I chose it on the basis of the “Zanussi promise” which guaranteed sending someone out for a repair within 24 hours (or thereabouts). When it went wrong after not very long at all I rang them up. “We might be able to get someone to you on Wednesday in two weeks time.” Our three children were quite small at this point and being without a washing machine for over two weeks was not a minor inconvenience. “What,” I asked, “about the Zanussi promise?” “Ah well, it’s not really a promise, it’s more of an aspiration.” Back to Tempo. A washing machine from them went wrong within days of purchase. They refused to do anything much about it, so I loaded it into my car and drove it in. I managed to find the very reluctant to deal with me manager and gave him two choices. Either take it back, I will choose another, more expensive machine and pay you the difference, which seemed win-win to me, or I will just leave it here and cancel the payment instalments. “You can do what you like but if you stop the payments we will really mess with your credit rating.” Unfortunately for him I knew what to do about that threat – you can put “in dispute” into your credit history. He refused the exchange so I backed the car up to the entrance and dumped the useless object right in the middle of the doorway, drove off and stopped the payments. I never heard from them again.
There was one Currys manager though who really took the biscuit. To cut a long story fairly short, a relatively high-end HP desktop computer (for business especially I will pay more for speed and reliability) failed after under a year of use. It was still under warranty. I let them know straight away but this was during lockdown and so it was some weeks before I was able or felt safe to take it in. The warranty had by then, he said, expired. Even that wasn’t the case because I had taken out an extended warranty but he wouldn’t have it. I don’t know what happened to HP, they used to be a classy brand. To be fair to HP, one Currys employee wearily told me “If it’s in here, it’s out of date.” I would have to pay for the repair, an amount he refused to attempt to quantify. I was batted backwards and forwards between HP themselves and Currys, finally getting the manager’s agreement that they would undertake the repair if HP provided an authorisation number. This I eventually obtained and gave to them, but still they wouldn’t do it, even after a letter by me to and pressure from the consumer affairs section of Computeractive magazine. My only option was the small claims court. I had long since had to replace the machine – I couldn’t run my businesses without one and the refund would have amounted to £800. A significant sum, but I am afraid I gave up. I just couldn’t afford to spend any more time on it after the hours and hours of letter-writing and phone calls. I don’t understand how Currys could afford to have spent so much time on it. Clearly this manager who couldn’t, incidentally, actually spell the word “warranty” (“warrantee”), felt that his personal annual bonus, presumably docked for accepting returns, was more important than the reputation of his employers and in the long run the jobs of his employees. We had spent tens of thousands of pounds with them over the years – white goods mostly, and computers – but he was willing to lose us completely and forever over this one item and he didn’t care. Legally he was completely in the wrong, without a shadow of a doubt, but the trouble with people like him is that they rely on wearing you down. I am extremely stubborn and I write a good letter if I say so myself. There must be many others who give up at a much earlier stage. And they wonder why people turn to Amazon.
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