A regular Sainsbury’s customer complained to us that he had been ignored at the deli counter.  Three members of staff chatted amongst themselves, none of them willing to serve the sole customer at their counter.  He asked “Anybody bothering to serve?” and got the response from one employee “Not if you talk to me like that?”

Many of us will have seen the signs across a broad range of businesses demanding that the customer respect their employees.  Without question utellus supports this position.  However as with all demands for respect, there also comes responsibility.  Members of staff have a responsibility to do their job to the best of their ability, and must be prepared to accept criticism when they fall below the standards that the typical consumer requires.  Likewise customers have the right to be treated with respect, not contempt.

We asked Sainsbury’s if they would like to comment and they told us: “We expect our colleagues to serve customers politely and efficiently at all times.  We welcome feedback from our customers and would encourage them in the future to report bad service (and indeed very good service) to a member of the store's management team.”

Hiding behind rights, and ignoring responsibilities will have only one outcome, particularly in a recession.  All customer facing businesses need to face up to the challenges ahead, and ensure that their staff are best prepared to deal with them.

I recently wanted to purchase a new private health insurance policy for me and the family having left a job and lost the company provided scheme. Being internet savvy and being 2008, i fully expected to be able to go online and get a price and feature comparison of some leading insurers products and to be able to select and buy my policy instantly online. For the benefit of readers, this is often also referred to as private medical insurance or PMI.

I visited various sites that appeared in Google for the search health insurance. My expectations were met when i found a range of sites offering instant quotes. However i was flabbergasted with the number of sites that scammed me and took my fully personal details before announcing that "an agent will call me straight away to discuss my requirement" (or equivalent message). In some cases the sites just simply passed my details (without my permission) directly to one insurance company without any assessment of my needs or requirements. I will name and shame some of these companies, so that you can avoid them.

MediCube - Health insurance for less 

In the worst case, a company called MediCube, claimed "MediCube compares over 35 leading insurers including..." and provides an "instant quote within seconds". They took all my details including date of birth, sex, name, address, phone numbers, postcode, email address. Enough information to commit identity theft and impersonate me. I suppose i should have guessed from the final question "when's the best time to call". The next screen after that, unbelievably, tells you:

Thank you! Our insurance partner Health-On-Line have received your details and are already preparing your quote.

I was so angry at being misled in this way, that i called up the company to complain and gave a pretty major tyrade to the poor receptionist. I told her that i would be calling Health-on-line to tell them that under no circumstances would i buy their policy as i had been misled. A bit later i was called back by the Managing Director of MediCube who very eloquently explained that he had reviewed the systems and that they had discovered a glitch today and that this would never happen again. He was so convincing that i believed him. As it turned out, i did buy a policy from Health-on-line but via another broker who did need to call me but at least admitted this fact on their website - if only on the third page.

I went back today, several months later, to see if this company is still doing the same. I couldn't believe it, i asked for a quote and exactly the same thing happened. This company unscrupulously misleads you into providing your personal details and then discloses that information without your permission. This is an infringement of data protection, is mis-selling and is, in my opinion, illegal. 

Right To Health - Independent health insurance specialists

In another example, a firm called Right to Health say "Get a Free Online Quote" and back it up with "competitive and affordable health insurance quotation comparing all leading providers". Am i going mad or does this not imply that i should expect the quote to be received online. Again i provided my personal identity information including name, email, date of birth, address, post code and phone number, click the "Get a quote" button and hey presto :

Thank you   One of our advisors will be in contact shortly.

Best Deal Insurance

These guys say on their homepage "fill in your details once and get an instant online quote from over 20 insurance companies in less than 30 seconds". Now i will admit that this is under the heading of "life insurance" but it definitely misleads you in to believing that this applies to health insurance because when you take the link to health insurance you get to a form which has 3 visible steps: Step 1 requires Name, Date of birth, family details, phone numbers, email, address etc. At the top you can see that step 2 is called "Quotes". So of course you fully expect to receive quotes after completing the form. Instead, when you click the link you get "Thank you for submitting your details, one of our advisors will contact you within the next 24 hours to discuss your requirements with you ..."

MoneySupermarket 

And of the big names in Price Comparison: MoneySupermarket hit me with 3 lots of pop-up adverts and sponsor links before taking some rudimentary details and offering me a choice of 82 policies. In this case, the leaders in online financial services price comparison are committing a different crime. They are pretending to assess your needs and present matching policies when in fact they are assessing nothing and just giving you a bewildering and meaningless list of policies with some insurers appearing over 20 times in the list. In end the purpose of this is clear. Its to drive you to click any one of the linsk

I do not wish to be bullied by these companies so i have written this article using a nom-de-plume for the time being. However if you wish to contact me or comment on the article, just add a comment using the link below. Also i have not included links to the perpetrator's websites because we don't want to indirectly help them - do we ?

For reference, here are some of the insurance companies that provide good health insurance schemes: Allianz, AXA PPP Healthcare, BCWA Healthcare, BHSF, BUPA, Capital Healthcare, Cigna, Exeter Friendly Society, Freedom Healthnet, General & Medical, Groupama Healthcare, Health-on-Line, Norwich Union Healthcare, Patient Choice, Permanent Health Company PHC, Prudential - PruHealth, Secure Health, Standard Life HealthCare, Universal Provident Limited, Western Provident Association - WPA

Price comparison sites like uSwitch & moneysupermarket that let you find the best deal on energy suppliers in a flash,  seem heaven sent. You would imagine that with 6 major players in the market competing heavily, that we’d all be getting fantastic energy prices, that profits would be falling and the suppliers would be in free-fall. And yet the opposite seems to be happening.

The irony, is that the price comparison sites are in part to blame for the phenomenon. The energy suppliers know that when they increase prices, only a small proportion of customers have the time and energy to look elsewhere and move suppliers. They also know that as they each take it in turns at different times of the year to do their price rises, that they pick up as many as they lose because they know that they will appear top of the price comparison charts for a period of time. The price comparison sites are also very convenient to the suppliers – they help them to defend accusations of anti-competitive practices.

And that’s the optimistic point of view. Wouldn’t you like to be the one who wanders into a central London hotel one evening and sits down next to a group of 6 fat cats talking about how they can work together without anyone ever knowing to ensure that they’re all profitable !

Competition is not working in this market. With 6 suppliers, it should be aggressive but it isn’t. The truth is that this market is not competitive at all. One of the key aspects of a competitive market is that there are low barriers to entry and new competitors can come in to keep the incumbents on their toes.  This market is not open to new entrants and innovation because the six retailers are also the six wholesalers who supply energy to the market. Between them they effectively keep out new competitors.

The government need to act on this and create a proper market before we’re going to get sensible prices for our energy.

Tamba, the twins and multiple births association, has asked utellus to lend its weight to the issue of supermarket trolleys.  Tamba Chief Executive Keith Reed explains "Many members have reported a lack of shopping trolleys that accommodates their family size at supermarkets across the UK.  Unfortunately, this has often resulted in them cancelling their shopping trip.  Clearly this is both inconvenient and unfair for the families concerned."

Tamba has asked each chain to explain:

• Their policy on the number of shopping trolleys each store should have for multiple birth families with children in the new born, toddler and early years age brackets.
• What additional assistance your stores might be able to offer to these families to make their shopping experience more enjoyable. 
• How many of these trolleys you have at each store and where they can be located.

Tamba wants to promote this infomation for its members, as Keith Reed says "We propose making this information publicly available via our website.  As you can appreciate, this information will be useful to multiple birth families and larger families more generally and therefore I look forward to hearing from them."

If this issue has affected you, then Tamba would love to hear from you.  You can lodge your comments either with Tamba directly or by filling in our TAMBA survey.

For quite a while, I've wondered about the big machine in the entrance of my local Sainsburys.  It looks pretty impressive, and is called Coinstar with a big slogan on it "Turn your coins into cash".  This is the thing that puzzles me - my coins are cash; I regularly use them to buy things, and no one complains.  I also regularly get coins given to me as 'change', and I don't have an issue with it.  Should I be worried?

Coinstar want me to take the £10 (or whatever) of spare change that sits on my sidetable and put it in their machine.  They'll count it for me, confirm that "yes, it's £10" and then give me a voucher for £9.21 - the other 79p was their charge for counting it for me - which I then have to take to the customer service desk to cash for ... coins! 

So here are my options:

1. Count the change myself and then spend it
2. Put the change in a machine, which will then count it at a cost of 7.9%, then receive a voucher which I take to a desk to receive cash.

I know what I would do.

Many people will know that 2007 was the year of the Rugby World Cup in France.  Thousands of fans bought tickets for the many matches stages across France, Wales and Scotland.  Not surprisingly, with the competition on our doorstep, a huge number of these fans were Scottish, English and Welsh.

One of our directors bought two Team Packs from the official distributor, Ticketmaster, which entitled him to a pair of tickets for each of Wales’ pool games, plus the right to 1/4 final and 1/2 final tickets should Wales progress that far.

The process was simple - Ticketmaster charged for all tickets, including the knockout stages, and promised that “if the team chosen for the Team Pack did not qualify for the quarter- and/or semi finals, the price of the corresponding ticket(s) would be fully reimbursed within six weeks of the Rugby World Cup Final.”  The final was held on 20th October, so six weeks took us to 1 December.

On 1 December he received an email from Ticketmaster which said “Due to some administrative delays from the Organising Committee, there has been a slight delay to the processing of refunds.  We are aiming to have all refunds processed by 15 December.”

On 15 December he received another email:  “We have experienced further delays subsequently preventing us being able to issue your refunds by the previously stated 15 December. We expect to be in a position to refund you shortly, we will contact you as soon as we have completed the refund procedure.”

utellus wonders - where has the money gone, how many fans are affected, and what is happening to the interest on the tens of thousands of pounds owed to those loyal individuals?