Good and bad customer service in SE1

I'll start. The staff in the Borough High Street Post Office are always charming, helpful, friendly and efficient. Surprisingly and pleasingly so.

Except the woman at the far right window. Sheesh... My heart sinks when I am called to her window. She is miserable, difficult, argumentative and generally seems to hate her job and all her customers. The feeling is definitely mutual!

With people like that I always try to think that we never know what pain people are carrying (physically or emotionally). She may have the most awful of lives.

She may just be a nasty old boot.

But my point is that you don't know.

Birdie wrote:

With people like that I always try to think that we never know what pain people are carrying (physically or emotionally). She may have the most awful of lives.

She may well, but she should seek help, and not take out her bitterness on customers.

The SE1/SE16 Sorting Office staff can be rude and unhelpful...

As can the Royal Mail service as a whole....why is it the Royal Mail seems to top the list of so many people's lists of unhelpful/unfriendly/useless/ignorant/bad driver (the list could go on and on)when they are meant to be a service...with all that that is meant to entail. I'm sure there are lovely people working there too, but the overall impression for a lot of people seems to be of a very poor level of customer satisfaction. Roll on competition....it seems to have worked almost everywhere else so lets give it a try.

jh wrote:

Roll on competition....it seems to have worked almost everywhere else so lets give it a try.

no thanks, we've had enogh competition and it stinks.
let me see, serco, the railways. the airports, crapita, eds, tube improvements, hospitals etc.

i'd rather go back to the old days when public services were properly funded, there were no queues at tooley street post office, the mail came twice a day promptly and i knew the postman so well that an envelope with my name on it alone was a sufficient address ...

Good customer service: Marks at More London, who when they found they had overcharged me refunded me the full price of the product and then gave it to me for free!

Bad customer service: Cost-Cutter on Tooley Street. How dare you interrupt their chatting and be impudent enough to try and give them some money? No pleases, no thankyous, no eye-contact and your change thrown back at you. Dicks.

I have had nothing but bad customer service at the shopping centre branch of Tesco Ghetto (thanks to Alan Carr for that joke). The rudeness, stroppiness and rank incompetence of staff has taken my breath away several times.

Until this week. A charming manageress called Ana agreed to exchange my 10 bags of coppers for a £10 note. I only asked because Shabbey National refused to take them, even though I have an account there, and I didn't want to shlep them all home again because they weighed a ton.

Talking of CostCutter... The branch on Tower Bridge Road (Bricklayer's Arms end) once refused my Scottish pounds. I argued these notes have legal tender in the UK, but they wouldn't hear anything. Thanks God another convenience store has just opened next door, and they are so much nicer there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_tender#In_the_United_Kingdom

Bank of England notes are the only banknotes that are legal tender in England and Wales. United Kingdom coinage is legal tender, but in limited amounts for coins below £1.
Scottish notes are not legal tender anywhere in the UK, including Scotland where only the coins are officially legal tender.