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.