Good brand tOuch – Kwik Fit

It’s 8:05 pm and I’ve just come off the phone to a lady from the Kwik Fit customer call centre. My, those Indians are far better at the Glasgee accent than the Glaswegians! She rang me to enquire whether I was satisfied with the service I’d received at their Shipley garage.

A little background: For a couple of weeks I’ve been hooking up my Ford Focus to the missus’s Galaxy just to get it started (amazing how much power there is in a bar of chocolate.) Eventually after a meeting in Bradford I had to suffer the indignity of pushing my old banger out of the company’s car park, half-in, half-out of the driver’s door, then hopping in, John Wayne stylee at the optimum time - all in front of a near 2,000 strong workforce. Now even though I say it myself, in a bucket of rust that takes balls of steel.

Long story short, upon sighting the welcome blue and yellow sign of Kwik Fit in my peripheral vision I hand-braked in to the forecourt without an indication to my name – after all, it’s absolute gospel that using your indicator when your battery isn’t charging increases your chances of stalling… isn’t it?

Anyway, my good brand tOuch tale is not about the service I received from the fitters, but from the call I’ve just received from Gloria Glasgee. It went something like this:

GG. Just wanted to say thank you for using our garage in Shipley.

Me. Er, that’s okay, thanks for having me.

GG. Just enquiring as to whether you were happy with the service.

Me. Er yes, yes I was actually, very good, thank you.

GG. Oh that’s great. Do you think there’s anything else we could have done to improve the service?

Me. Ummm, no… no I really don’t think so. (If I was being totally brutal, a couple of the lads could have smiled a bit more, but hey, I’d rather have fast, efficient service over false mateyness any day.)

So there you have it. A nice courteous call, relevant and specific to my experience and blow me, the phone even rang after I’d safely packed the rugrats off to Slumberland. Okay, I’ve got a fair idea how Gloria knew I’d visited the Shipley garage for a new battery, but how the hell did she know I was a dad of three?

Blimey, they’re good.

Not so good brand tOuch – Kwik Fit

This has got to be a record. Good brand tOuch followed by not so good in the space of one minute 35 seconds; with the same brand; in the same phone call.

Gloria from Glasgow then went on to say, ‘Just while you’re on Sir…’ Hang on, I wasn’t on, you were! ‘Just wondered if you knew that Kwik Fit do car insurance and we’re offering customers a 10% discount…’

Oh dear. My momentary Kwik Fit fizz went as flat as my old car battery in an instant. Deflated, I explained I wasn’t interested and got on with pondering how naïve I’d been thinking that a commercial organisation might possibly have seen some longer-term value in simply enquiring after their customers’ interests.

I must admit though, Kwik Fit did warm me up nicely with their opening gambit before bringing me down by trying to upsell me in the second part.

Those sneaky Kwif Fit f***ers! *

* That’s fitters to you.

Not so good brand tOuch - LCC

At my age, a certain condition takes over your body that forces you to peek out of the window every now and then. The other morning, it was bin collection day, which rather excitingly, gave me extra incentive for a bit of curtain twitching.

There was my green bin being duly emptied but then I clapped eyes on our neighbour’s being somewhat pillaged and one or two items thrown onto the grass verge by the grump in the dayglo jacket. When I finally got my sorry self ready for work and out onto the drive I noticed the said items weren’t of the correct recyclable nature. Okay, fair enough, slightly naughty neighbour, but come on, don’t people pay their taxes to get some sort of customer service on a human level? Surely a service that expects people to behave like robots could quite easily be performed by robots.

I’d love to get my hands on the Leeds City Council brand because like every other Council in the land, it’s an organisation that has the opportunity to touch so many people’s lives in a positive way but just as many chances to make a bit of a mess of it.

Good brand tOuch - ECC

My missus says my 20 year old Muddy Fox is not fit for sticking our three year old daughter on the back to ride pillion. So I’ve had to park the trusty boneshaker I’ve been riding for donkey’s in favour of a newer model. No, not the wife, the bike. Handily, there’s an Edinburgh Cycle Cooperative just up the road from me, full of extremely helpful and knowledgeable staff – you can tell they don’t take people on who aren’t geekishly into bikes. Apparently, all new bikes need tweaking and adjusting after six weeks and I was told to expect a postcard through my door on a certain date informing me that my free maintenance check was due.

True to their word and bang on time, ECC sent my reminder and now all I have to do is take my new baby in, discuss any issues and they’ll tweak it to perfect running order. They build up their email and postal database every time a new customer tips up but they also use it, not to pester previous customers, but to offer value, which of course reinforces the fact that a new bike is not just for the first six weeks, but for life.