Customer Service Funk
I’m in a funk, a funk about the state of my house, and the state of the concept of ‘customer service’.
I don’t even know where to start.
I think the funk first began about two days ago after pouring through the pages of Ideal Home, when it became quickly apparent to me that my home is far from ideal.
Why?
Not because I’m lacking in creative ideas for my home, or even money to carry out these dreams, but time, complete and utter lack of time. So you would think I could clear some time by perhaps hiring a domestic cleaner?
Hey, what a great idea! Get someone to spend hours and hours each week tidying my home (it’s large and I have two small children, keeping this house clean is a mammoth task each week), and then I will have more time spare to decorate it, or time to at least find someone who can decorate it for me.
So ‘get one then’ I hear you say. If only it was that simple, if only.
Out of the four companies I’ve tried, two were great, but both of those had to move onto to other commitments (they were individuals) the remaining two were ‘professional’ cleaning firms.
Professional my ass.
Both firms (£15 an hour no less) would constantly ‘miss bits’ and although they have a guarantee that they will return to clean the bit they missed if asked, you can imagine it gets a bit embarressing after a while demanding that the cleaner come back and sweep the stairs or other bits she completely ommitted.
So both firms were fired, and now I have no cleaner and as I type this I’m sitting in my bed surrounded by bedroom walls that my husband half stripped of wall paper at Christmas and has failed to find time to finish since. They are supposed to be stripped, plastered, painted and so on. I’ve had ugly half stripped walls for nearly two months and I can’t even blame my husband. He too lurches from work to cleaning, to childcare to work, to back to cleaning and barely has a second spare for such tasks.
So what makes a cleaning firm think it’s acceptable to miss bits? Even if you are an employee of a firm, where is your pride in your work? They can’t blame the ‘job’ because they may perceive it to be boring/unappealing work - that is no excuse.
15 years ago I used to file title deeds in the basement of a building owned by NatWest, now this is a boring thankless sort of job, it is literally filing and nothing more, but you can bet I was the quickest and most efficient filing person there. Well I got promoted didn’t I?
So now as a freelance designer for many clients, I would never dream of missing bits or getting bits wrong and then think it’s ok because I guarantee to ‘come back and fix it’.
Never mind about my clients embarressment about having to ask me to fix something I didn’t get right for the umpteenth time. Never mind their stress and lost time in having to chase me up for petty mistakes.
I won’t say I don’t make mistakes, because I do sometimes, we are all human, but it’s extremely infrequent - the cleaning firms I’ve tried made an error every single time they came. That’s just a plain lack of care and pride in your work and nothing more.
So now I’ve had no firm for 18mths, the house is clean but getting into a worse and worse state of general decorative repair because we now have no time left to decorate on top of the cleaning and some rooms haven’t even been decorated barely since we moved in 7 years ago….others were decorated and now need a second going over.
I don’t know how to find a good cleaner and so my next plan of attack is to hire someone to do the decorating - someone that can project manage it all with the minimum of hand holding. Can you imagine the torture of being a creative visual sort of person living in a home that is far far from perfect and beautiful.
What is the purpose of home magazines…to inspire or depress? They used to inspire me, but now I have no time to carry out the inspirations they drive, they just depress me!
Know any good decorators in the Midlands area? Or cleaners for that matter!? 
