Unbelievable Customer Service: the good, the bad, and the simply…unbelievable

Customer service in England seems to vary in much the same way as Melbourne weather varies: it has extremes. It doesn’t really do just ordinary or middle of the road. In England we’ve decided, you seem to get unbelievable customer service the like of which we have never encountered (and didn’t think possible) – and you can add the adjective ‘good’ or ‘bad’ before unbelievable in that sentence. Either fits. As of today, we have another category: just 'unbelievable'. You'll see why.

I’ve already blogged about the unbelievably bad, and as that is resolved I think we should move on.

What we haven’t done is speak of the unbelievably good, and the simply unbelievable.

The unbelievably good is (itself unbelievably) to be found in, of all things, a bank. Yes, you read correctly, a bank. We have been impressed beyond our belief with our bank. Our general attitude to banks in Australia was tolerance. The service was usually average to uninviting; the bureaucracy involved in what seemed to us simple transactions was excruciating and the general experience of ever having to deal with the bank about just about anything was painful. And of course, banks in Australia now charge fees for any kind of contact you have (or don’t have) with them. That, we thought, was just how banks are. Thorns and thistles of a sinful world pop up in unexpected places and banks are just one place where they cause frustration. At least they don’t stop you in the street at gunpoint and make you hand over all your cash, ‘in the interest of their shareholders’.

Now when we return to Australia and need to endure such things again we can lie back and think of England. Because in England there is at least one bank that has completely changed the way we think of banking.

It all started when we went to open a bank account. They allowed us to do this from Australia (for a fairly hefty fee), and were incredibly well organized about it. They gave us the correct forms to fill out (not to be taken for granted). They told us this or that would happen, and lo and behold, this or that actually did happen. They told us to go to London with our passports when we arrived and collect our keycards. And when we went to London with our passports, we were actually able to do just that. Not only that, but they had a special waiting room for folk in our situation with tea, coffee and hot chocolate laid on. They actually had someone come and speak to us – one-to-one – and explain how everything worked. She spent about ½ to ¾ hour with us and answered all our questions, set up internet banking for us, and so forth and was genuinely friendly. And she told us the startling and extraordinary news that our bank does not charge us fees. (This we initially met with suspicion and incredulity… and then as it sank in were more and more amazed. What about the poor shareholders that we are always been told about in Australia? Were we expected to make donations? How does it work that the bank earns interest from our money and doesn't collect fees from us for the privilege?)

Every time we’ve been into this bank we’ve had a good experience. The most extraordinary time would have to be when we were randomly walking past the bank at about 4:50. To our surprise it was open. Partly out of sheer novelty value we walked in: new experiences and all – what would the inside of a bank look like after 4:30pm? The place was buzzing. There was a customer service counter, and as Mark had an Australian cheque in his wallet which was more than three months old, I thought it might be good to ask whether there was any possibility of actually depositing it in our account. I held out very little hope that anything would come of this and expected to be told off for even asking.

So, we waited in the queue (like good English people) and watched in amazement as the three customer service people interacted with great enthusiasm with some tricky customers. By the time our turn came it was just before 5pm and we were feeling a bit bad for bothering them so close to closing time and were going to leave, but the woman who came to serve us was so keen to help us and wouldn’t hear of us leaving. We explained the situation with the cheque and said that all we wanted to do was find out whether it was possible to deposit it in our account, and that we’d be happy to come back and do that some other time. We just wanted a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. She seemed to take it personally that we might leave before having deposited the cheque and not only told us we could do so, but insisted on explaining to us how the process would work. (We didn't actually care, but she was very committed to explaining exactly what the process would be, what our options were and which option she considered the best one for us in our situation). She then co-opted one of her assistant customer service people to take us upstairs and explain the situation for us to the teller, so that the teller would be sure to choose the option most beneficial to us. We protested that it was too close to closing time and we’d be happy to come back, but as it seemed that this would cause her great distress, we dutifully followed the assistant upstairs where he explained all to the teller. The teller then explained to us exactly what the implications of the option we’d chosen were, and then apologized for charging us a fee for that service. Quite frankly, we’re happy to pay fees if a service of some kind is actually performed.

So we were impressed: of the three employees we dealt with just before closing on a Friday afternoon, all three were courteous, communicated clearly and did their job well. And the money even arrived in our account, along with a letter from the bank explaining exactly what had happened in the transaction. Efficiency and competence from a bank - who'd have thought??

We’ve visited the bank in its various branches at other times to sort things out and it has always been much the same as that experience. It’s making us begin to believe that banks can be something other than an exercise in frustration we've experienced in Australia. No doubt when we come back to Australia, we’re going to be those annoying people who say, “In England, our bank would never…”

So much for the unbelievably good.

Now for the unbelievable.

I ordered a cot mattress from a reputable company on the internet. They said that they would deliver it the day after it was ordered. That would be today. I can't help noticing the absence of a cot mattress in our unit.

Late this afternoon I looked up the site to find more information on delivery. There they say they ‘expect to deliver the goods within five working days’, between 7:30am-6pm, which is not exactly helpful. That means that either Mark or I have to be here to take delivery for the next four days. I looked further at the site to try and find out whether there was any indication of whether they had dispatched our mattress specifically rather than just their general delivery policy, of which they have two which contradict one another.

Finally, I found a ‘track order’ section of the website and found our expected delivery date. It was listed as “5 January 2010 – 7 January 2010”.

It’s not so much that this is bad customer service. I mean the information is there. In fact, it’s very specific information: they show a significant ability to plan, given that they aren't just planning on delivering it at any time in general in 2010, but between 5-7 January in that year. That's incredibly precise for three years out. I have no idea what I’m likely to be doing 5-7 January 2008, let alone 2010, so it is worth recognising their obviously excellent forward planning. It's curious that a company with those kind of logistical capabilities has such trouble delivering its goods in the same year as the purchase, but one must give credit where it is due.

But I have to say, it's not the information that I was hoping for. I admit, I was hoping for a date that was more in the region of this year. Maybe even in the next few days. Not 2010. Call me fussy, but when I buy something, I don’t really want to have to wait three years to take receipt of it. Especially not when we’re likely to have a small child in the next few weeks. It seems that it is easier to bring a child into the world than it is to transport a mattress from one side of Oxford to the other.

About as unbelievable as not paying bank fees! JMB

Expressive English

We are in the process of changing from the night congregation at St Ebbes to the 10:00am congregation, in the lead up to Tiny’s arrival. The thought of taking a newborn out into the English winter at night being something we’d probably hold off on until we’re ready for slightly more advanced parenting challenges. Sunday just gone was a small interruption into that process, however. St Ebbes was holding a kids’ Christmas event in the late afternoon. Over here in England it is generally expected that if you have someone’s kids about that time (say over to play with yours) that you’ll feed them around then—afternoon tea is sort of that, the afternoon night meal. Possibly has something to do with the moon being visible at 4:30pm in winter.

And so St Ebbes was providing afternoon tea for a few hundred children. Each child got their own Christmas box packed meal—a specially made cardboard box with a Christmas design on top (all made by a parishioner), two very small sandwiches, and (separate) sausages, one mandarin, a cupcake, and a lindt ball (!). They also got a small popper—orange or apple. These were all made or provided for by parishioners. Jennie and I helped out with the packing of these goodies into the boxes, which meant that we then went to the 11:30am congregation.

It was interesting to go to the third congregation. It was, even more than the night congregation, for uni students. If we’d been feeling old in the night service (which we had…ridiculous at the grand old age of mid 30’s) then it was even worse at 11:30am. Unusually in my experience, this congregation only exists when term is on—it’s so for uni students, that it shuts down between terms. So the week we went was the last one for 2007.

The thing that struck us when we went to the service yesterday was how expressive the English are in the public arena. Not the preaching so much—while that has been of a very high quality in exegetical rigour, theological reflection, drawing out the implications, and as a piece of communication—St Ebbes is sort of known as a preaching church, so, while appreciative, we haven’t been surprised by that.

No, what we’ve been constantly struck by has been the unbelievable quality of the English public Bible reading and praying.

The praying has been reverent, meaningful, theologically rich, and substantial without being either stodgy or overblown. And the people praying have ‘gotten’ what it means to pray publicly—they are neither just speaking to God as though they were on their own, nor are they speaking to the congregation. They are praying prayers that lead the congregation into praying with them. And so far, it has happened 100% of the time at St Ebbes.

The Bible reading has been everything I have ever looked for when preaching on a passage to be read. It has been read to us, by people who are confident with language and its use. It is paced, inflected, and there is no stumbling over the words. Most of all, it is read out with meaning—every sentence and phrase sounds like actual speech, and is easy to pick up on things that are being said. And again, it’s happened 100% of the time here, through a multitude of styles.

Cut back to Australia. In my experience, often the best one can hope for in a church that values the Bible is for the Bible to be read without too much stumbling over words. It is rare (not unheard of, but definitely rare) for the Bible to be read in such a way that the reading itself is sensitive to the literary and linguistic clues as to the meaning of the whole and reads the passage in such a way as to help the hearer ‘get it’ (without being hamfisted in over reading those clues, or over emoting the passage). It is rare even in Moore chapel, where the people doing it are both gifted and training for a lifetime of doing it. And the story is similar, but not quite as bad, when it comes to public praying.

Yet here at Ebbes, the readers and prayers have spanned the chronological spectrum from early twenties to sixtyish. And it has all been edifying in the best sense of the word. I wish we could bottle it and send it home.

It could be argued that Ebbes is an unusual sample—a university church in Oxford. No doubt there’s some truth to that. I doubt all English are this articulate in public. But I’ve been to university churches in Australia. And I’ve never seen anything like this, and it happens every week here. There’s something bigger going on.

It suggests to me that one of Australia’s distinctive cultural features is being inarticulate and hamfisted with language. I think this is why the Sydney Diocese’s ‘plain style’ of preaching works so well in Australia. The average Australian listener doesn’t ‘get’ anything other than the most prosaic and stripped back kind of style. We trust a Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s stammering or a Pauline Hanson strine or a Bob Hawke ‘common man talk’ far more than anything that might suggest that the person is comfortable with speaking publicly. We like our leaders to be as bad at public speaking as we are. I suspect it’s one of the reasons why our politicians have pretty much given up on doing anything other than speak to us in sound bites. One sentence to capture a complex issue in as stripped down a form as possible.

I’ve always noted how much easier Americans seem to find speaking in public. There’s minimal self-consciousness or nerves, just a confident expression of whatever they think or feel. Like the Romans of old, they seem to get how important public speaking is for a country of world rulers. But it’s clear the English have their version of it. Not so much the American sense of speaking in public, as an interest in language and how it works to enable them to express it well in a public setting. (Interestingly, the English also had a world-spanning empire, and still think of themselves a bit that way). In their own ways, both countries seem to get the value of communication.

What do we have in Australia? We are good at sport. And the quintessential Aussie bloke way of communicating is to punch his mate on the arm. When it comes to Australia, it really is the case that we say it best when we say nothing at all.

You see it in the movie Cosi. The protagonist has managed to pull off a performance of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte in a mental hospital, with no training in diversion therapy or the like (it’s an Australian comedy, as you’ll gather). It has been, as is the wont with such movies, a transforming experience for many of the characters. We come to the great final scene, the dénouement, when something of the experience is to be captured for us. We don’t get any great speeches as per West Wing. We don’t get any witty statements that capture the issues as per Yes Minister. We get a long period of silence as the core characters look at each other. Then the head of security, who’d been as close to a nemesis as you get throughout the movie, says to the hero, in as matter of fact tones as possible, “You did good.” And the hero walks off in silence. Cue credits.

I suggest that if we’re looking for ‘Australia values’ for these citizenship tests, we could start by putting down something like ‘I swear to always be mildly inarticulate in a public setting.’ It’s as Aussie as…(silence). MDB