Customer service and my experience

In any business one of the most of important aspect to stay competitive and for long time is the customer service. Yes, every marketing book will tell this. If we dig a little with this is not only marketing books, but almost all the fields of management tell the same story. When we investigate supply chain, operations, strategy, human resource etc, all are talking about customer satisfaction. The type of customer may be different in every talk. It may be a B2B, B2C business. Human resource also talks about customers, for them customers are the prospective employees or current employees. Only difference is the nature of the customer. When there is so much talk customer then why business don’t understand customer service at all. I don’t really have time to explore many services but whatever I have experienced till not I have found that customer service is very low in UK business. I have many examples to prove my argument. I live in city centre and go to university by bus every morning. There is a schedule pasted on each bus stop but that is only for reference, rarely any bus turn up on time. It will be better if it is written on the schedule that bus will come after the time printed on the schedule. It is very bad experience when professors are strict about time. Other interesting place is the NHS. They have a wonderful system of appointment. You for anything, stand in the queue and get an appointment to see GP after one week, then there is another appointment for blood test or Xray after one or two weeks, then another appointment. One of my colleague was bleeding in the hand, he had to take appointment that was after one hour. He lost around half a litre blood. I booked a ticket on onerailway and now for cancelling the ticket I need to trust royal post. If the ticket is lost in the transit they will not refund. Shouldn’t the cancellation/refund we straight forward as the purchase of ticket is? But who cares customer has given money, we don’t want to return is the message from companies. There are many other examples but these might have given a fair idea of poor customer service.Question that comes to mind is why it so? Why companies don’t bother about customers? One of the reason I see is the monopoly. It is strange to say monopoly here but it is true. Most of the business are heavily regulated by government. Entry is not easy or very expensive. Generally there is only bus operator in one city, even if more operators are their route will be divided so there is no completion. Same things happen in case of rail travel. There are so many rail companies (I think around 26 in total) operating independently in UK and they have little interest in sharing information or network. These companies share network just because they have to. But there are so many restriction on ticket that a customer is forced to take either high price ticket or odd timing or same network trains even if they have poor service. Supposedly private companies should serve better than public companies but sadly some of the neighbour socialist countries have much better services (fast euro trains and on time departure) without having much competition from private players. Just having private players does not help customer, there are many other factors that need to taken into consideration. One of the solution is to have more competition and watch the formation of cartels. As in case of mobile operators. Most of the mobile operators have almost same plans without much distinction. They have a implicit policy to charge £10 per month for very little talk time. They encourage customers to spend more than £15 per month. PS: All these are my personal opinions of experiences I have till now. I may be unlucky to find rare bad experiences.