Caveat: Commercial long Covid is speeding death of customer service

Some friends recently told me a story of poor customer service at a luxury Dublin hotel. It wasn’t a tale of unmitigated woe − nobody was hurt or sustained huge loss or was overly discommoded. It was a relatively minor disagreement over the method of payment for a bill, squarely in the realm of first-world problems.

Yet the story resonated as a neat example of the casual attitudes displayed lately by some well-known businesses towards normal standards – the death of customer service. My own recent anecdotal experience suggests such attitudes have morphed into a secondary pandemic over the past two years.

The hospitality and travel industries were among the worst affected by this bout of commercial long Covid. Customers should not be expected to accept these standards forever. Nor will they.

Unfortunately, Covid has become the boilerplate excuse in some businesses for shoddy standards of service that simply would not have been so widely accepted prior to coronavirus. Sorry, we don’t have the staff to give you proper service – Covid. No we don’t do that for customers anymore – Covid.

EV sales in China are accelerating ahead of Europe and the US, with 100 new models to launch this year

---

The world’s richest countries must invest in effective, cheap technologies to tackle climate change

---

Sony WF-1000XM5 wireless earbuds: another leap forward in quality and comfort

---

Technology developed in Cork allows wedding photos to be shared digitally with the happy couple

---

Often, such excuses are delivered with an air of insouciance. It telegraphs an expectation that because Covid clearly does cause problems, especially in labour-intensive businesses, those problems can be automatically passed on to customers. Yet managers are supposed to be in the business of solving difficult problems. Too many have thrown their hands in the air and given up.

Even where Covid is not the excuse, such as during the incident I mentioned at the Dublin hotel, it is hard not to conclude that such a casual attitude to basic customer service would not be sustained if it did not exist in a climate where standards everywhere have fallen in the pandemic.

Marker Hotel

The group of friends comprised six women who spent an afternoon in Dublin’s docklands in the spa at the Marker Hotel, a five-star property that was last year named by Condé Nast as the best in the country. After their spa day, they headed upstairs to its rooftop bar and terrace for drinks and food.

Their bill upstairs came to €650, which doesn’t buy as raucous an evening as the price might suggest. It is an expensive hotel and this was a rare treat for the group. The six friends each placed a credit or debit card on the table and asked for payment to be split six ways. Not a laborious item-by-item six-way split of the bill. Just a straightforward, clean, even split of payment between their respective cards.

The staff refused to process payment this way and said all €650 had to go on one card. The group queried why this was so, as the full bill clearly was a lot for one person to handle. They were told the hotel’s computer system couldn’t process it, which seemed far-fetched. They were told to “Revolut each other afterwards”. Some had the Revolut payments app but others did not.

The employees dug their heels in so the customers did too. One staff member said they could all go downstairs and out to an ATM, where they could each withdraw cash and then put it together to pay the bill. They could have done that. But it would have been considered an aberration in customer service standards in any five-star hotel in which I worked.

They asked to see the manager. For women who have spent an hour or two having cocktails and food, this is a potentially embarrassing move. They risk just being dismissed as Karens. But they knew they were in the right and were determined to receive fairer treatment. The manager explained that the hotel asks customers to pay singular bills to prevent congestion at card machines during busy periods. It isn’t busy now, the group responded. Eventually, the hotel relented and split payment (not the bill) six ways as requested.

Given a chance to respond this week, a spokesperson for the Marker said it has a one bill per table policy, but she insisted that multiple payments within that bill are allowed. That would be a normal policy, but it differs starkly to the experience of this group on the evening in question. The spokesperson said perhaps there was a “miscommunication”. Asking six women to go out onto the street and each hit up an ATM for cash isn’t just a miscommunication, it is just dire service.

No excuse

Two and a half years ago, prior to the pandemic, it would be difficult to imagine the employees of a five-star hotel trying that kind of thing. Now there is an expectation that it will be accepted.

I have stayed in a couple of other hotels in recent months for two-night stays, where the rooms were not made up on the day in-between. It used to be normal for housekeeping to give a room a once-over during a stay, but in the pandemic’s early stages most hotels abandoned this practice to reduce contact. But we know now that Covid is spread mostly through breathing someone else’s air, and far less so through surface contact. Leaving rooms unmade is pointless. I can make a bed. It’s not a big deal. But why are so many hotels abandoning normal practice, using Covid as the excuse?

Róisín Ingle’s column in The Irish Times on Wednesday brilliantly described the customer service swamp swallowing Irish Rail, where seat reservations mean nothing. That has long been a problem. But since Covid, customers can’t even get a cup of tea on a train anymore. The pandemic is no excuse. Why does Irish Rail think these standards should be accepted?

Bus Éireann has implemented a wave of cancellations at little or no notice in recent weeks because it hasn’t hired enough staff. Routes in the northwest of the country are especially affected, yet the company minimised the problem in this newspaper recently by claiming that most customers could be put on an alternative service “within two hours”.

That is a dire level of service. Commuter buses in the Dublin area are affected by similar problems. I dare anyone from Transport for Ireland to go to Enniskerry and ask people there how the service is holding up on the (Go Ahead-operated) number 185, the route that time forgot. Covid and staffing issues are routinely trotted out as excuses to angry passengers.

Ryanair often has been compared unfavourably (and unfairly) to Aer Lingus on service standards but, my oh my, how the tables have been turned recently. While Ryanair has performed well in travel’s recovery, the former national flag carrier Aer Lingus has been in the mire, cancelling dozens of flights from Dublin at short notice, and still in possession of 1,200 pieces of luggage that never made their flights. It has been deservedly pilloried. At first, it kept incanting that it had prepared a plan to deal with Covid contingencies. The plan obviously was deficient.

Covid and staffing issues do cause operational problems for many businesses, but they must adapt and cannot keep using it as an excuse forever. Other issues, such as the experience of the group in the Marker, are simply down to common-or-garden sloppiness on standards.

An economic slowdown is coming. Customers everywhere soon will start paying closer attention to the experience they get for their money. Businesses with poor customer service will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.