If you’ve been watching TV recently, you’ll have spotted that service is everywhere. In our new and shiny Big Society we do love a campaign, so while Hugh, Jamie et al are saving the fish, Mary Portas and Michel Roux Jr are on a mission to improve customer service in the UK.
Most of this is yeah-yeah kind of stuff, but there was a great moment in the Mary Portas show where she led a flashmob to H&M who started giving customers the service that the H&M staff weren’t bothering to give. Very funny and neatly done.
In a similar vein may I commend this site to you, wherein our narrator takes direct revenge on a snowboarding shop that sold him some duff gloves. It has quite a lot of rude words in it but is compulsive reading and heroic stuff if it’s true.
This is meant to be a financial services blog, so on the day that IFAs started seeing up to an 840% rise in their FSCS levies to pay for the Keydata naughtiness, let’s all spend a happy moment thinking about direct action we’d like to take a) against the FSA, b) against recalcitrant providers or c) our parents for, like, totally ruining our lives when we were 15.
Joking apart (were there jokes?), financial companies get away with absolute murder because we have made it our business to create products and structures that are almost perverse in their complexity. Massive pressure from IFAs and customers has occasionally generated results, but with the latent anger of the public rising all the time against the banks, what price a serious, sustained direct action campaign against someone?
And let’s not assume it’ll be a provider in the firing line. If David Prosser’s recent piece in the Independent is anything to go by then IFAs themselves could be next
These reforms, which include more exacting qualifications for those who give financial advice to the public, the abolition of sales commissions and a new code of ethics, are naturally to be welcomed. But there is a better way for financial advisers to restore trust: stop ripping people off.
Yikes. Maybe a little PR campaign about what good work IFAs do ahead of RDR might be welcome?
