Arrival

The invitation from Whine and Cheese arrived at last. The welcome post was succinct indeed and I can add no more on the subject of our inaugural meeting except to write that the participants were extraordinarily tidy munchers and no wine was spilled. I usually need warning flags attached to my knife and fork....

I have done a little bit of basic research on the subject of whining. It seems that there is international, general condemnation of all so called 'customer services' departments with special criticism of those in the telecoms/ISP business. The consensus is that these departments were set up to defend the organization against attack in the face of poor performance of product or service. There is little attempt apparently at delivering the customer service brief which I in my niaivity think is to provide 'service recovery' (such as a refund, replacement, compensation, apology or a mix from these).

So it might be that an effective whine needs to bypass customer services entirely.

They are staffed by script readers rather than decision makers and it is the decision makers who can deliver the solution the whiner is seeking. I suppose it makes sense in the first instance for the whiner to have a clear idea of what he or she wants from the miscreant organization.
This idea should be in the bounds of commercial reality though. In law, compensation is mostly about setting the claimant back to the financial position they were in before they bought the product or service. Anything above that is a bonus.

A German friend who, like me is a buying manager, said to me he applies the same rules to his personal purchases as he does in his business responsibilities. In a nutshell he is ruthless towards any organization which delivers substandard service or product regardless. I identify with this approach but recognise that in B2B we often deal with dedicated account managers/directors who are much easier to get a result from than a faceless customer services assistant/supervisor/manager.
So there; back we are to stepping over the call centre completely.
But each claim will probably need a tailored approach and not all customer service operations are rubbish and also as mentioned in the welcome post, there are the very serious, moral issues concerning all of us about poor health care, the dignity of the human condition and the treatment of the vulnerable. We sometimes have to support our fellows as well as ourselves.
That's also a part of this group.

Delivered.