Sending customers into a spin

Customers all over Australia have been sent into a bit of a spin this week – in pretty much every sense of the word.

It was Westpac who launched the downward spiral with an interest rate rise almost double that of the Reserve Bank, but things then plummeted to new lows with an animation emailed to customers that was a journalist's wet dream in the otherwise quiet pre-Christmas season.

Twitter was also abuzz, with my favourite being @bigriveroz who wrote: "hey westpac, last time i checked, the local cafe selling banana smoothies didn't make $3.4b while in a cosy cartel protected by the govt".

And it didn't end there. CEO Gail Kelly hit the press the next day to spruik the importance of customer service and the bank's commitment to relationships and reliability. But it was sheer folly for Westpac to try to promote the positive side of the bank sharing their problems with customers, especially as most of the positives seem to have taken the shape of profits sprinkled with the odd bonus. In the same week, reports from the Fairfax stables were suggesting an annual $2.6m cash bonus for Kelly's efforts alone. It's often said that money makes the world go round, but by now the insensitivity was making most people a little dizzy.

However, insensitivity seems to be a popular character trait for most customer service departments around Australia. In my case, it was Foxtel, the 900-pound gorilla of subscription TV, trying to cosy up to me with some sweet talk this week.

Let me give you the background. After months of frustration, I'd finally decided to send a short email to Foxtel to complain about a problem with my service. To be perfectly honest, it was more of a quibble than a problem. However, Foxtel's holier-than-thou advertising paints a vivid portrait of suburban delight, which only serves to grate on me even more when things go wrong.

The return call from customer services started well – the female voice at the other end of the phone seemed helpful and happy to talk.

However, when it quickly became obvious that the best she could do was a paltry "Yes, it's annoying for me too!", I started to wonder whether the point of her call was to sympathise with me, but not actually do anything.

I responded with a polite pitch for service not sympathy, but she immediately hit me out of the park with another gem: "If I help you, I have to help 1.7 million people".

And when I touched a couple of light volleys over the net to see if she would even acknowledge some level of responsibility, she gamely responded with a barrage of cross-court forehands that offered tips but no fix, and I found myself pinned at the back of the court, waving my racket in vain as the ball quite literally spun out of control.

Taking pity on me for a fleeting moment, she did offer a free copy of the Foxtel magazine. However, when I suggested that Foxtel might want to consider making this a monthly occurrence, she threw her racket to the ground in frustration, telling me that she simply didn't have the time to be able to make that happen.

I finally teed up another ball, only for her to shout at the top of my backswing that "I could downgrade my subscription if I wanted". I looked up for a split second in sheer astonishment – how could getting even less possibly be a helpful solution? Needless to say, I completely missed the ball, and my humiliation at the hands of Foxtel's customer service was complete.

I'm not quite certain at what point the phone call became more about Foxtel than me, but it reminded me that businesses like Foxtel and the banks appear to be more about profit than people. I'm all for success in commerce, but surely customers should be the linchpin of that success, rather than have it come at their cost.

I still don't know when Foxtel plan to fix my little quibble.

But maybe that's because there are obviously much bigger problems facing their customers which they need to fix first.