Friday, November 6th, 2026, 6:14 am
Manchester City Council Report Card – Part 3 – Unfriendly Staff
Filed under: “Customer Service” 101 is something like “Customer is Always Right”
t risk of overgeneralising, I’ve hardly found truly useful and friendly staff at Manchester City Council’s “Customer Service” (and yes, they actually used the word “CUSTOMER”!).
Yesterday I identified one lady there whom I said was nice and helpful to me (2 weeks earlier). Instead of receiving a smile another lady there took that as some sort of offensive remark, stating, “am I not also nice?” (Paraphrasing here)
She had only spoken to my wife, so I responded by saying that I don’t know (yet). Having deal with 7 or 8 at “Customer Service” (only one was male), I can say only one or maybe two seemed genuinely nice.
Since “Customer Service” is a person-facing (“Customer”) service, then we clearly have a problem here.
We didn’t walk in to have a fight with them, but I think they get many difficult “customers” (we saw one), so they are easily agitated and generally assume/presume they need to call “Security” or involve threats. As I’ll note in a later part, their security staff there (probably some contractor like G4S) almost outnumbers all other staff, maybe even outnumbers staff and customers combined.
Lopsided and misguided allocation of staff/money?
