I was very much looking forward to the return to our screens of my favourite person in retail: Mary Portas, aka Queen of Shops, now aka Secret Shopper.

And she certainly didn’t disappoint in last night’s opening show. The woman is always so spot on, you would have thought shopping and retail are in her DNA…

The star-themed fitting rooms plus the Twitter facility she did for Pilot were genius. Thank God Pilot’s boss, Chris, saw the potential and went with it in the end. He would have been crazy not to!

Image courtesy of Channel 4 Press Office

Yes, customer service seems to have gone down the drain these days at the hands of business managers who, like Chris, allow their staff to go untrained and unmotivated but still expect to rake in big profits. Nice one!

But this ‘phenomenon’ is by no means exclusive to the fashion industry or even the UK. Just before Christmas, my niece went to a new hair salon in Spain, attracted by the promise of a special deal for new customers: wash and blow dry for €10.

When she went to pay, she was not asked for €10 but €23. She requested an itemised bill - which the staff faffed about for a ages apparently – and noticed she’d been charged €3 extra for her long hair (the special deal was for short hair only) and another €10 for a hair serum my niece hadn’t actually asked for so. Clearly she protested on the spot.

The salon staff argued that, because they had used the product on her already, they had to charge her. Errr…. nobody asked if she wanted it in the first place, what if she’d been allergic to it??? Absolutely crazy!

My niece asked to see the manager but, after much going over the issue, the weren’t getting anywhere. He simply apologised and said it wouldn’t happen again, at which point my very fed-up niece said: ‘Too right it won’t, because I am not coming back, neither will I be recommending you to my family or friends. Goodbye.’

Obviously, neither the manager nor his staff had received any customer service training, so not only did they loose a customer but they also put the salon’s reputation in jeopardy for €10. What a good manager should have done is to take the extra €10 off my niece’s bill, apologise and see her off HAPPY. That way she might have considered going back some time.

So is customer service down to money really? Do we get what we pay for? It shouldn’t have to be that way but, sadly, it seems it is. Take air travel, for instance: for plain, basic, cheap flights, there is Ryanair; for everything else… there is MasterCard. Oops, sorry, a bit of a tv lapse there but… you know what I meant.

And another thought. Are we partly to blame for bad customer service becoming ‘common practice’? I mean, have we been fuelling the downfall ourselves with our money, instead of refusing to buy from businesses whose service is not up to scratch, no matter how cheap goods or services are?

Image courtesy of Channel 4 Press Office

Mary Portas’s pulling power should hopefully help mobilising people to demand good customer service. In the meantime, at Caradiaz we shall continue to endeavour to keep our customers happy – and judging from the repeat orders and the emails and calls we get with positive feedback, we’re not doing too badly!