Exactly what it says on the tin

Those who think they know me surmise that I'm a crotchety old misery-guts. Possibly with good reason. The blog isn't by the Grumpy Goat for nothing.

But, surprisingly, it's relatively easy to make me happy and to keep me that way. I'll let you into a little secret. Essentially, all I want is for things to happen as advertised. A digital camera that comes out of the box and takes digital photos is unlikely to disappoint me. Someone who promises to return my loaned DVD on Thursday and then does so is a source of some satisfaction.

To keep me in a state of delight, simply deliver a little more than was promised. Go the extra mile, or even an additional yard. I rang DEWA yesterday to report a minor water leak on the Authority side of the meter, and by the time I got back to the Crumbling Villa it had been attended to (although there's still a small leak...). Another example is when I discovered quite by accident that my pocket digital camera would record moving pictures with sound.

It is cheating, however, to offer an inferior service than what you advertise and then briefly to upgrade it to 'adequate'. This is what happened to Seabee with Itisalot recently, and it produced a blog praising Itisalot's customer service with such effulgent enthusiasm that it ended up on last week's Gulf News blogosphere page. I find the idiom 'damned with faint praise' springing to mind.

Good old Red Triangles Bank rang me a little while back, with a customer satisfaction survey. A series of questions took the form: "On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is worst and 10 is best, how do you rate...?" Bearing in mind the foregoing, if the service is pretty much as advertised, I give it five or six. Yet the interviewer recoils like a kicked puppy if I report that I am "fairly satisfied" and then don't give a score of nine.

The list of things that make me unhappy is far longer than I intend to type. A couple of selected examples includes software that crashes, photocopiers that jam, expecially when I'm in a hurry, vending machines that eat the money and don't dispense goods, and real estate developers who don't provide the facilities they promised. Also people who promise faithfully and then simply fail to turn up. Whether its recalcitrant inanimate objects or unreliable people, I feel very much like Basil Fawlty berating his Austin 1300 estate: "If you don't go, there's little point in having you."

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