I HAVE seen over the years a significant diminishing in the quality of customer service in the UK with regard to services and goods and this is something that needs to be addressed if we want to have a better standard of living in this country.

Some examples of services are where we have to call up to query a bill or even make a complaint.

It is never straightforward.

First, we get the usual voice saying that we are in a queue and then have to go through all the vague options, sometimes at our expense.

Then when we do get to speak to someone, it is sometimes frustratingly difficult to understand them.

In some cases you may be speaking to someone in India, you then ask to speak to a manager.

By this time, you will have spent say 20 minutes on the phone and are still no further on.

So essentially telephone customer service just does not work as it should to meet the needs of the customer.

Then we have websites where organisations do not make it easy for the customer to complain about the poor service received.

A classic example of this is the Post Office/Royal Mail/Parcel Force where they do not clearly show how one can make a complaint about the service, or Sky for a telephone number to contact them to “talk” to a human being about your impending end of contract.

These organisations look to me like they are being run incompetently by discouraging any interaction with customers who may have issues while getting away with a shoddy quality service that we are paying for.

What is needed is a certificated minimum quality standard for websites and customer service where the customer comes first.

Only by doing this do you have a benchmark for measuring improvements when you compare the quality customer service to that of 30/40 years ago.

Back then you could speak to a human at the tax office whereas now you end up waiting on the phone for lengthy periods being passed post to pillar before speaking to someone, if you are lucky, to explain your tax code etc.

The HMRC app for use on your phone does not allow one to simply message HMRC with a query, so who designed such an unusable app in the interests of customer service?

Essentially, we need to go back to basics of simply looking at how people live and making their lives as simple as possible without the need for saying Artificial Intelligence will do the job. It will not.

We shouldn’t forget that the computer is only as good as the person programming it.

Colin Telfer, Darlington.