Modern life is rubbish, says RUTH SUNDERLAND

Companies used to live by the credo that the customer is always right. The UK is a service economy.

But despite the sickening bleat about how nice and socially responsible they are, most companies seem to be doing their best for their customers.

I don’t even expect adequate service anymore, but brace myself from the start for incompetence, indifference, fobbing off, gaslighting and endless waiting calls.

It’s fashionable for companies to pretend to care about mental health, so why are they psychologically torturing customers?

Even the simplest bit of housekeeping runs the risk of becoming a road that descends into customer service Hades.

Like many of us, I’ve been trying to look for less expensive home insurance policies when I faced a big hike in premiums. In our case an increase of 16.5 percent, despite no claims for more than ten years.

Perhaps we should count ourselves lucky, compared to the outrageous increases of 70 percent or more that Jeff Prestridge identified in The Mail on Sunday. Trying to find a better deal involved life-sapping calls on creaky lines to remote call centers — including one where the handler cut me off after 22 minutes and 56 seconds because her shift was over.

But individual employees on the cutting edge, who often appear to be dutifully trained and operating from a script, are not to blame. The culprits are companies that outsource ‘service’ to cheap locations abroad and use half-baked artificial intelligence.

This deadly combination is a recipe for rage, as I found out when I tried to find out from my electricity supplier why the standing charge had doubled in two years.

First I received scripted answers explaining why the energy price had risen. When I pointed out that this doesn’t explain the increase in the fixed fee, I was told it was because I had switched from a fixed to a variable rate, but that also made no sense.

A simple question led to a three-day WhatsApp odyssey involving five people and a few robots, but no satisfactory answer.

I have several theories as to why service has gone downhill. Even though companies want to provide good service, the current shortage on the labor market makes that difficult. It also feels like customers have been relegated in the pecking order, behind employees.

Post-Covid, a culture of pandering to the workforce through weak management has emerged. But the trend among organizations to eschew human contact in favor of automated “solutions”—usually nothing of the sort—predates the pandemic.

Banks want us to use apps so they can close branches. Supermarkets send us to self-checkout. Passengers must check in their luggage and print boarding passes.

Even HMRC is participating. To avoid talking to taxpayers, they want to text. Don’t they realize that no sane person calls their tax office for fun? We only call when we have to, usually when a text message isn’t enough.

Service is jettisoned in an unacceptable transfer of effort from companies to their customers. They want to turn us into unpaid bank clerks, store clerks, airline check-in clerks, and meter readers.

The latter have long since died out and consumers have been bullied into installing so-called ‘smart’ meters. Ours broke down in early January and we were initially told it wouldn’t be fixed for maybe six months. It works now, but for how long?

Bad service is depressing. It is so widespread that it lowers the national mood. It steals thousands of hours of our time that could be much better spent. No wonder life feels so hard work.