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How come we as a nation here in UK have been trained to expect such terrible customer service?

How did we allow this to happen, so that we’re gushing with gratitude when someone merely does their job?

I saw a post on Facebook recently, we have an interest in posts like this since we’re a firm of women plumbers, it said that the plumber had installed a new loo and urinated all over it and the surrounding floor before leaving.

Now the customer was surprised enough at his behaviour to post it as a status update on Facebook, but the comments were interesting.

No one expected the plumber not to answer the call of nature but no one was surprised at what he’d done. In fact, the jokey tone of the responses made it very clear this is exactly the kind of treatment customers expect from the building trade.

UK is famous for poor customer service, but the building trades exceed all others in their terrible levels of customer service and top in the building trades is plumbing.

Most professionals don’t come into your home to practice, but the ones who do, it seems, treat us the worst.

Few service providers, except perhaps counsellors and therapists and doctors and nurses see us as distraught as when our house has broken and yet few treat us so inconsiderately across the board.

We do know some other tradespeople who, like us, prioritise excellent customer service. Like us, they’re always busy and have plenty of loyal customers who come back time and again and refer their friends.

There’s no doubt that customers vote with their money when customer service is either excellent or terrible.

But still, programmes like ‘Rogue Traders’ on TV show us that the norm is at best mediocre customer service.

At Stopcocks Women Plumbers we don’t stand for this. We assume women are going to give good standards of customer service (we stick out like a sore thumb and our reputation matters) but we don’t leave it to chance.

We train all our plumbers in customer service to ensure our minimum is as good as most tradespeoples’ maximum and we have a Code of Conduct with very strict sanctions if it’s broken.

We seek actual testimonials; stories of how our plumbers behave in customers houses and don’t rely on vague star ratings where traders can gain 4 or 5 stars just for turning up.

For us, this is business as usual. And our testimonials are great, though sometimes hard to capture when shouted out of a car door as a customer passes us on the street!