A month or two back I bought an electric fire. It was on offer so looked a good deal. When I got home a found that I needed an additional, very simple, metal surround to fit the fire properly into my fireplace. I found that this had to be ordered direct from the manufacturer. I paid about £20 for a simple, thin strip of metal and about £7.00 for its delivery. This took some of the shine off my purchase.

When it turns out that an initial purchase needs to be followed by other essential but smaller purchases that add to the cost, nibbling is taking place. If not careful, the purchaser can end up paying significantly more than they first intended. Computer software can be great product for the nibbling seller.

I travel into London fairly regularly for work. The train is the one realistic option and there is only one train service provider I can use. Sometimes, just as we are reaching our destination the conductor, via the public address system, thanks us for travelling with their company and expresses the hope that we choose to travel with their train company again. This announcement is at best ignored by customers and at worst the catalyst for some less than complimentary responses.

When we are presented with a choice between two companies but we know that each choice offers more or less the same benefits or, as above, we know there is effectively only one real choice we can make, we are being presented with a false choice. Train services are the obvious example, but there are elements of false choice syndrome to be found elsewhere - the utility services, such as telephone, gas and electricity spring to mind.

I recently purchased a rather large radiator cabinet over the Internet. The process was simple, straightforward and I must say that I was very impressed. However, when the cabinet was delivered I found that it was damaged. I rang up the company straightaway and was told that the damaged cabinet would be collected and a replacement delivered.

The cabinet was collected but no replacement was forthcoming. I rang the company again and was given another telephone number to ring. I rang this number and was told that the cabinet was out of stock and that I would be informed when it was back in stock and when a replacement would be delivered. Weeks passed and nothing happened. I rang the company several times and got the same answer.

Eventually, I was told that the item was not only out of stock but discontinued, and that I would have to claim a refund. I was given another telephone number to do this. I duly rang up their refund department and got my refund very quickly. However, the whole process from initial ordering to the final refund had taken nearly two months. I very felt very frustrated by the end of it all.

If we are able to make a purchase easily but then find that a subsequent problem or query needs to be dealt with in different ways by different people (usually in different parts of the country), we have become victims of the ‘back end maze or trap’. Car hire, insurance and anything involving direct debit or credit arrangements are particularly prone to this irritant. The front – end point of sale arrangements are very simple and straightforward, but any back end processes for following up problems or queries are as awkward as the sale arrangements are slick.

My wife and me decided that we wanted to pay off some of our mortgage and get a better deal in the process. We went to our current mortgage provider and told them what we wanted. Their advisor told us in no uncertain terms that if we wanted the best deal available we would have to change our provider, because the best deals were only offered to new customers. We promptly changed our mortgage provider and thought a lot less of our old one.

If your current provider of goods and/or services offers others a better price or overall deal than you were able to achieve, you are probably one of the provider’s old customers. Young and/or new customers are important to a business’s growth, so they are most likely to get the best deals waved in their direction. Old customers, however, are likely to be taken for granted, the business assuming that they will be too apathetic (or busy) to shop around.

My wife was seriously ill a few years back and we became well acquainted with a local accident and emergency hospital. I wondered, especially in view of her serious condition, why my wife was not admitted straightaway, and why she had to stay in a corridor on a stretcher for many hours, waiting for a doctor to admit her. Later, I found out that waiting times for treatment did not start until a patient was officially admitted.

I still become angry when I think about the above situation, especially as the hospital in question recently advertised how well it was doing against its waiting time targets.

When organisations have very demanding targets imposed on them by Government or some other central HQ, ways will sometimes be found to meet these targets that do not always benefit the customer.

If our personal experience of a service is not congruent with the positive statistics available from the provider of the service, perhaps we have become victims of tyrannical targets. In the end, a target unthinkingly imposed on an organisation will find some way of imposing itself negatively on that organisation’s customers.

A friend of mine went to her bank to conduct a routine transaction. During this transaction the cashier started asking personal questions about what my friend did with her money and how she planned to use it in the future. My friend was surprised by this and later, when she thought about it, she became somewhat bemused and annoyed.

An organisation is using legitimised nosiness when it tries to gain information it is not entitled to and justifies this by alluding to its legitimate business area. The cashier in the above example felt that she could justify asking personal financial questions of my friend because the bank she worked for dealt with monetary matters. Obviously the one does not necessarily legitimise the other.

Here are some suggestions for avoiding the six irritants and significantly enhancing customer service:

1. To avoid nibbling implement a consistent, upfront pricing policy

Make sure that this policy requires a clear statement of all charges at the outset of any transaction. Make sure that nothing is forgotten or inadvertently hidden. Make sure the organisation consistently sticks to this pricing regime.

2. To avoid the false choice syndrome encourage staff to make positive assumptions about customers not negative ones

Encouraging staff to assume customers are intelligent people that can work out where real choices are involved will help stop the organisation falling into the habit of offering customers the illusion of choice.

3. To avoid the back end trap or maze employ ‘the look through principle’

Analyse all of your process from the front – end selling point to the back end admin. point. Look at the process from the viewpoint of the customer; get their feedback. Travel through each stage of the process with the customer. Where does the process become opaque and difficult to follow? Where do most of the delays occur in the process? What are the most typical reasons for the delay? Remember that you have only made your entire process transparent and easy to use when at least 80% of your customers agree that you have.

4. To avoid customer ageism implement a ‘fairness and consistency policy’

This policy is about encouraging the organisation to analyse its policies, procedures, advertising and selling tactics in order to assure that they offer a fair and consistent service to all customers, new or long term.

5. To avoid tyrannical targets, agree challenging, quantitative targets that are accompanied by qualitative indicators

Agreeing rather than imposing challenging quantitative targets will help motivate staff to achieve them. Agreeing and using accompanying qualitative indicators will help make clear how a target is to be met, not just what is to be achieved.

A complaints officer may meet their target of processing so many complaints in a day, but how many of the people processed feel satisfied with the answer they have received or the action that has been taken? How many complainants feel that they have been given individual attention and that their concerns have been taken seriously? With a little thought, qualitative indicators for these types of areas can be identified and agreed, and ways found to obtain feedback about how well staff are measuring up to them.

A sense of agreement, ownership and specific qualitative indicators to accompany quantitative targets will help insure against targets being met at the expense or discomfort of the customer.

This policy needs to give staff straightforward guidance about:

How to respect customers’ personal space

What questions should and should not be asked during contact with customers.

The above six irritants act as gradual corrosives, burning, wearing away and diminishing customers’ perceptions of the organisations they routinely use. Over time, organisations that do not acknowledge and address these irritants will be scratched out of existence, or be perceived as unpleasant ulcers best avoided.

If organisations wish to survive and thrive over the long term, they must actively seek out these irritants in their systems and address them explicitly and specifically. Once this has been done organisations can continue to develop their levels of customer service, safe in the knowledge that their efforts will not be continuously undermined by low level, chronic customer dissatisfactions. They will have rid themselves, and their customers, of the itch that cannot be scratched.

There are six irritants that inhibit the provision of genuinely effective customer service:

These are:

Nibbling: when it is found that an initial purchase needs to be followed up by smaller but just as essential purchases that add significantly to the original cost.

The back end trap or maze: where the front - end slickness of the sales process is counter balanced by the awkward complexity of the back – end, after – sales process.

Customer ageism: where new customers are offered attractive deals at the expense of long – term customers.

Tyrannical targets: where demanding targets are imposed on organisations and they result in negative outcomes for the organisation’s customers.

Legitimised nosiness: where organisations try to gain information they are not entitled to and justify this by alluding to their legitimate business areas.

Implement a consistent, upfront pricing policy

Encourage staff to make positive assumptions about customers

Employ ‘the look through principle’

Implement a fairness and consistency policy

Agree challenging quantitative targets that are accompanied by agreed qualitative indicators

Implement a customer privacy policy

Organisations that do not address the six irritants will find themselves scratched out of existence or perceived as unpleasant ulcers best avoided.

Organisations that do address the six irritants will be able to enhance their levels of customer service without having their efforts undermined by the chronic itch of customer dissatisfaction.