It’s enough to make you turn to drink…

WARNING: This is a rant, thinly disguised as a blog.

Amidst all of the current travails with gas supplies and costs, food shortages, care home, crises, petrol shortages and so on, has anyone else noted the almost entire abandonment of customer service in many areas of life? Really, it’s not so much customer service as actually getting anything done. Here’s 4 examples:

-      11.5 months after moving home my electricity company still cannot connect my address to my meter number and alternately sends me threatening debt collection letters and refund cheques. I can only communicate with them via email or webchat, with lengthy delays.

-      We’ve just submitted a legal form to an official organisation. According to their website they need six weeks just to log it and acknowledge receipt of it.

-      An eager property management company visited our development for an hour and promised a proposal within 3 days. That was 6 weeks ago. I’ve left voice messages and sent texts and emails and they’ve never responded to any of them.

-      Since the summer I’ve been assisting a friend with a financial issue that has to be resolved by mid-November. 9 weeks after starting the process with a company, we had one email saying they’re still waiting for a basic document from the solicitors and then a second saying they had not been aware of the deadline, despite it being referenced on all of the completed forms.

Interestingly, I signed up for a new wine delivery service recently and they delivered my order 24 hours early. Booze 1 – Bureaucracy 0

Rant over