Friday, October 23rd, 2026, 5:50 am
Manchester City Council Customer Service Issues – Part II – No More Complaints by Paper, Only Digital and Without Tracking of Reports
Filed under: Deterioration of service
N the last (latest, but first) part which I published hours ago I spoke about the “root cause” of my visit to Manchester City Council Customer Service, where I very seldom go to.
In this part I shall focus on a rather dysfunctional issue reporting system. I spent a long time talking to staff about it (nearly an hour) to better understand what they were and were not capable of doing. I took some notes too (with a pen). I shall get to them at the end when I write up some conclusions (with notes at hand). I will follow up next month with another visit to see if progress was made (I’m pessimistic about it, but it’s unfair to rule out progress without actually checking).
Upon asking many questions (about 3-4 ladies at the Manchester City Council Customer Service desk) it seemed clear that everything was to be done “online” and the E-mail address they could provide – only after half an hour – was “ecitizen” alias or something like that (I assume electronic citizen). I said it would likely not be tracked (by time or code) and would therefore be a “one-way street” – not something that would provide solutions or prove fruitful a lot of the time.
To be clear, I never went to Manchester City Council asking for benefits, didn’t overuse any over-the-counter services. I’m like an ideal “customer”. I’m mostly invisible to them, I just pay my bills and sometimes use online services (e.g. to order bins). I only ever go there in person if something went very badly.
Manchester City Council Customer Service, according to itself, no longer has paper forms to issue complaints or to raise issues.
What’s remarkable about this is that two ladies at the counter attempted to find such a form, recalling that it did in fact exist. Then they said that apparently they no longer have that!
Amazing.
Does the Manchester City Council Customer Service assume everyone has a computer, has an Internet connection, and knows how to use a computer? Not only elderly people lack at least some of these things.
I will chase up with another visit next month to ask about this. There are accessibility issues at stake. I want to politely insist that this option prevails.
I explained to staff there that registering complaints online means pushing text into bots to make statistics and maybe slideshows, maybe even feeding them into large language models to deal with words in bulk, without anyone paying any attention to any of the text. If people chose their words carefully only to be fed or ingested as slop, than it is not respectful.
If done on paper, an actual person must open and read (then handle or redirect) the input.
Worse of all, they confessed to me there’s no way to get a reference ID/number for an issue reported. If that’s the case, then it’s a recipe for problems.
Since I was already there in person, with a technical bit of input at hand, why could I not speak to another person about it?
I explained to them that in some banks I reported similar issues and my input was better received/welcomed.
It would be really sad if Manchester City Council Customer Service became worse than banks.
In the next part I’ll deal with staffing and capacity issues.
To be clear, I left the place in amicable terms and it was all smiles as my envelope with input was placed in internal mail.
I recovered from what was becoming hostile and toxic (in my opinion) and what seemed like 4GS (or similar) stepping in to record the exchanges.
Why does the Council wish to make “incidents” or escalate (like police) where no intervention is needed, no bad words are used, and the solution is attainable by manners, communications, and understanding?
One lady there at the desk deserves credit for approaching me nicely and offering a partial solution, whereas her colleagues lacked these interpersonal skills.
