Rona Dougall: If customers are always right why do firms try to make it so hard for us to complain?

The number of customer complaints in the UK has reached an all-time high. A survey has revealed that 17% of us have experienced a product or service problem in the last year. And it’s costing businesses a whopping £9 billion a month to deal with all these dissatisfied consumers.

The chief executive of the Institute of Customer Services says that firms need to understand “the trade-offs people are willing to consider in terms of price, quality, availability, sustainability and support”.

Perhaps the most important statistic in the whole survey is that 35% of customers would pay more for a better service. Surely, if it’s costing companies such a massive amount of money to deal with disgruntled shoppers, it should be a no-brainer to improve customer service.

I have always enjoyed a bit of a moan but as I get older this behaviour seems to have stepped up a level. My daughters find it excruciating when I question anything in a restaurant or dare to criticise a meal. I can see them squirming with embarrassment. But why should we accept bad service and poor-quality food just to be polite?

The girls sigh and say I’m acting like a “Karen”. A Karen, in case you’re wondering, is a pejorative term for a demanding middle-aged white woman. Someone like, well, me, apparently.

But there is so much to complain about at the moment. There has been a perfect storm of events which has made life very difficult for businesses; Brexit, global supply chain issues, strikes and labour shortages.

You can’t walk along a street at the moment without seeing advert after advert in shop windows advertising for staff. Restaurants and coffee shops are struggling to survive and many are having to either close completely or only open on certain days. It really is a tough time to be running a business.

And the chaos at airports across the country is giving passengers plenty to be upset about too. I had to travel through Gatwick Airport recently on my way to a family holiday in Greece and I saw a lot of very upset travellers. Flights were being cancelled left, right and centre and loads were delayed.

I’d taken out comprehensive travel insurance, the pessimist in me bracing myself for the worst. In the end, my flight was only delayed for about an hour, but my gosh, even within that time a lot of people were getting very irate.

The problem is that when things go wrong, people are having to queue for hours at help desks, becoming angrier and angrier as time goes on. It’s horrible for everyone involved, and I include the airport staff in that.

It’s amazing though how good customer service can transform your experience. There is a certain store in Edinburgh that I will always go to shop in because I know if things go wrong, they’ll take my concerns seriously. It takes the stress out of the whole experience, yes you pay more, but it’s worth it in the end.

There are some people who’ve made something of an art-form out of complaining. One friend of mine practically starts a stopwatch every time he gets on a plane or a train. If it leaves so much as a minute past the time you’re eligible to claim a refund, he’s filled in the form and is fighting for his rights. I do admire his tenacity and he proudly tells me that he’s saved a fortune over the years.

So much of the time though I can’t be bothered with the whole rigmarole of filling in forms or sitting for a half an hour in a queue on the phone listening to “Muzak” only to be transferred to department after department in a futile attempt to find the right person to complain to.

Sometimes it’s easier to suck it up and accept the loss. I reckon that’s what many companies rely on. In fact I’m convinced many make it deliberately complicated to put people off.

It takes a lot to deter my pal I mentioned earlier though. No grievance is too small for him to pursue. He tried to get a refund from a corner shop once because he reckoned a packet of crisps he’d bought weren’t up to scratch. The owner told him to sling his hook!