No, not a sci-fi movie, but an image of Britain as it could be, if the public got the high street banks they wanted, not the ones they have to endure, staffed by mouse-clicking zombies with dodgy haircuts and no obvious connection to the human race.
Such is the scale of public disaffection with our banks that more and more people are prepared to switch their allegiance from traditional lenders to those run by supermarkets. But unsurprisingly the retailer they most wished offered bank services is John Lewis, 148 years old and fabled for its silky customer service.
In a new poll by uSwitch, nearly three-quarters of those surveyed an
astonishing figure when you consider the risks involved in banking said
that they would trust John Lewis to look after their money.
Never mind that
its “partners” are more used to keeping the grateful middle classes in
quality white goods and soft furnishings than ISAs and endowment mortgages:
staff are courteous, affable and conscientious and, in a world where such
qualities are in pitifully short supply, that resonates with the man and
woman on the street.
Alas, there is no immediate prospect of the department store diversifying into
the banking sector. But the contrast between customer service as John Lewis
interprets the term and customer service as offered by the likes of Barclays (LSE: BARC.L - news)
and HSBC (LSE: HSBA.L - news) is so stark that you can hardly miss it.
[Related link: There is a better way to run a bank]
Broad smiles of the type that only cross bankers’ faces when they open the
envelope containing their annual bonus suffuse the whole store. The smiles
cost nothing, but they tell you everything you need to know about the
company’s ethos.
A few years ago, I asked John Lewis’s customer service manager how the company recruited such outstanding staff. “Oh, you can quickly tell if people are suitable for customer-facing jobs,” he replied. “They have a natural warmth about them. You can take an intelligent person and train them to be polite. But you can’t train a person to be nice.”
But could that niceness for which the paying public yearns and which is so absent from the typical high street bank, with its pervasive air of surly indifference be applied to other areas of the service culture?
Rather than handing the West Coast Main Line franchise to below-par operating
companies such as FirstGroup and Virgin, how about letting John Lewis
Railways have a go instead? You’d have commuter trains that not only turned
up on the time, but were staffed by beaming guards and ticket inspectors in
pristine uniforms who would call you “Sir” or “Madam”.
There would be buffet
cars without puddles of coffee on the floor, serving fresh, cut-above
sandwiches with interesting fillings and reasonably priced, too; you can’t
beat that “Never knowingly undersold” promise. The carriages would be
uncrowded, spotlessly clean, and with piles of fresh, white guest hand
towels in the “on-board facilities”. Which, for a change, would be never
knowingly out-of-service.
If John Lewis could make our trains run on time and with an acceptable level
of comfort, what’s to say they couldn’t turn around our other ailing
institutions, too such as the NHS? Imagine a hospital at which there was
an orderly waiting system and the receptionist didn’t look as if she had
just murdered her mother-in-law.
Imagine doctors and nurses who spoke the
Queen’s English and took the time to put you at your ease and answer your
questions and make you feel like a human being, not a statistic. Imagine
blood-test results that did not go missing in the post…
What if John Lewis ran the Inland Revenue? You’d have a tax office where the staff were on your side, didn’t treat you like a potential fraudster, and even helped you fill in the simplified tax form, rather than leave you to struggle with it for days on your own.
And what if John Lewis were in charge of traffic wardens? They’d be unfailingly polite, and cut offenders some slack occasionally, instead of slapping a ticket on your car the second the meter expired.
Just daydreams, of course. In a hectic world, customer service rarely receives the priority it deserves. John Lewis has set standards that others can only marvel at. But if it does decide to set up a bank on my high street, I will be first in the queue.
