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.

Our April award for customer service excellence goes to Rosemary Chan of on-line retailer www.buyaswatch.co.uk.

Our user takes up the story:  “A few years ago, I bought a watch from buyaswatch.co.uk which I subsequently lost. I was trying to find a replacement and it was no longer available from the site. With no information of the design name or model number, I contacted BuyASwatch.co.uk on 16 April 2007 at around 6pm with a description and the best photograph I had of my beloved watch, in the hope that they would be able to sell me one just like it.    

By 11:30 on 17 April, I received a very helpful response from Rosemary Chan who pointed me in the direction of an online retailer specialising in past ranges of Swatch watches.”

Congratulations to Rosemary - your certificate is on the way to you

Don’t forget that you can submit positive feedback through utellus in the same way as a complaint.

utellus CEO Phillipe de Wilde explains “Giving positive feedback can be as valuable as complaining.  We want companies to improve when they do something wrong - it’s as good an idea to bring to their attention something that has been done extremely well.  Organisations would be foolish to ignore what makes their customers happy, and if they know what that is, they can encourage more of it.”

Christopher Colgan, an employee in the motor claims department of More Th>n Insurance, has been recognised by utellus as providing outstanding customer service in January.

Our user told More Th>n “I had previously been very unhappy with the conflicting messages that I had received from various members of staff and was considering a formal complaint to the FSA. Mr Colgan’s manner and professionalism were instrumental in me deciding not to pursue a complaint. Above this, he also proposed procative solutions to the existing problems which have restored my faith in your company.

He went on to say: “I was extremely annoyed prior to the call; by the time it finished, I felt confident that something positive was going to be done. This was reinforced by a confirmatory letter received a few days later outlining exactly what had been agreed.”

We send our congratulations to Mr Colgan.

It’s a good thing to complain, as utellus founder Phillipe de Wilde explains:

"I stayed in a hotel in Bristol for a weekend and was amazed at the condition of the room – the ceiling showed signs of damp, and consequently the wallpaper on the nearest wall was starting to peel.

I wrote to the hotel manager after my stay and received a very prompt response in which he was very apologetic and delighted that this had been pointed out to him. It appears that the staff who went into the room to clean had either not noticed or chosen not to say anything, and he was therefore unaware that there was a problem. He committed to close the room to new occupants until the damage was rectified and redecorated, and gave me a substantial discount on my bill.

He recognised that it was better to know about the problem and fix it rather than be ignorant of it and lose potential repeat business as a result…. and I have been able to speak positively about the experience rather than slag the hotel off to all and sundry."

A positive result all round.