Is Britain Working?

I seem to spend a lot of my time firefighting. Not literally of course. But I have an ongoing list of things that have gone wrong. There are three main issues - Firstly that tradespeople  / manufacturers don't do the job properly in the first place. Secondly getting something done about that in a timely fashion takes huge commitment & wastes a lot of the customers time. Thirdly communication is really bad. When there is good customer service, & it does happen, I am truly grateful & surprised. 

But it really should not be like that. Why isn't good customer service the norm?

I have an issue currently with my car. It had a major service & MOT at a Nissan dealership & quite a lot of expensive work was done in order to pass. I've had Nissan cars for years & always had them serviced at the same dealership. Afterwards there were a couple of intermittant faults, the brakes squeal & there is an odd noise when reversing. The car is going in tomorrow to have the rear suspension done - at quite a high cost again. In order for the service people to check out the intermittant noises they want to charge me well over a hundred pounds on top. I think that is unreasonable given the circumstances, but they won't budge. It used to be the case that I had an informal chat with the service engineer & there was no diagnostic charge when the car was in for something else.

I had solar panels installed by Octopus earlier this year costing thousands. The Enphase gateway went wrong relatively soon afterwards. There was nothing wrong with my wifi & the App procedure didn't work. Eventually they admitted it was their fault & it was rectified remotely. Weeks ago it went wrong again. Same problem. I went on a forum & got advice that was well beyond my skill set. So I referred it to Octopus & got a ticket. Nothing has been done & I keep having to chase. It is ridiculous.

I re-did my LPA's recently. My solicitor forgot to put one document in when she sent it off to the OPG. We notified them & they agreed she could send it separately. Several telephone conversations chasing this, with different people, which we ensured were logged on the system, I got a letter saying my LPA's couldn't be registered because of missing documents. Despite the fact that the OPG had acknowledged receiving the document. I still haven't had my new documents back months after they were sent in. 

To my mind these are major failings. I could go on. They simply shouldn't happen. 

So I ask myself why? Is it the systems the companies have in place? Is it that they don't employ enough staff of the right calibre & experience? Is it that their personnel training isn't good enough? Is it that they are cutting costs? Is it that they simply don't care? 

I don't know. I suspect all of the above are true. 

The main issue, as I see it, is that Britain isn't working. When I say that I mean it isn't functioning adequately. Until we put this right we won't increase productivity, we won't achieve growth, we won't be a country in which people want to invest.

It isn't my micro problems that matter. It's the disfunctional country we now live in that will affect everybody. We all need to do something about this.