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.

We live in very interesting times.  A significant proportion of younger customer facing personnel, such as retail assistants, bank cashiers and leisure staff have probably never known a recession.  Those that have come into employment in the last ten years have only been exposed to a period of unprecedented growth, and consumers only too happy to part with their money. 

Over the next few weeks, utellus will be running a series of articles based on our customers issues in a number of industries and asks – how will companies respond to competing for the consumers’ decreasing disposable income; indeed do they even recognise that they need to do so?

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.

Transparency is key to earning customers’ trust; open and clear communication is one of the building blocks of transparency, clear organisational structure is another.

Any company which deals with the public should have a nominated and named contact. A terrific example of this kind of openness — not just in terms of sharing of information but also willingness to communicate with the customer base — can be seen in Warburton’s recent television campaign which give you the name and email address of Jonathan and Brett Warburton, currently at the helm of the family-owned business.

How can a company claim to be committed to customer service when the policy handed down from the ivory tower of Human Resources states that customers should not be informed of the name of their customer service manager? It seems almost unthinkable in the current business climate that a company would take such a defensive position to a fairly innocent enquiry, and yet this is the route that a major dairy foods provider, Dairy Crest Ltd, has opted for. Little wonder then that its customers are turning to utellus to resolve their customer service issues, and utellus is on the case.