ICS is not a regulatory body. We do , however offer our organisational members tools to help them to assess their levels of service competency, identify areas for improvement and set action plan for improvement. Again details can be found on our website.

With regards to cost for our Irish conference this is around 370 Euros for non members.

Hope to see you there!

Tesco – ditto – how can they constantly have empty shelves ?

Ulster Bank – seems to be staffed with incompetents – my old fella has had three deifferent explanations in the past week on how to perform a particular transaction with them.

Shirley – if you’re still there, a couple of questions for you –

How much does the Institute charge for corporate membership?

Are there any criteria associated being a member apart from paying the subscription?

Do you ever throw out members for providing poor customer service?

Have you an any kind of auditing procedure to ensure that your members are living up to the reputation of the institute?

How much would it cost to attend your Dublin conference? For an individual or a corporate non-member?

We are a Membership organisation with a community of over 360 Organisational Members and 8000 Individual Members & we are represented in both the UK & Ireland

In believing that customer service is increasingly the difference between success and failure, ICS helps organisations raise their customer service standards and individuals achieve professional recognition. We provide a framework for Members to learn from one another and offer wide-ranging support for continuous service improvement.

The types of things we do are
• advise & guide on world class service issues
• define professional customer service standards
• spread authoritative customer service knowledge through our Breakthrough Research
• offer a range of quality products and services to help organisations and individuals improve customer service
• promote a wide understanding of what service competence looks like and how individuals can acquire it.

Above all, ICS helps people and organisations grow in a way that benefits customers, organisational performance and individuals

For more information about ICS go to http://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com or email me at shirley.mcnabney@icsmail.ie.
Or why not come along to one of our events? Our Annual Conference is being held at Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow, London on 21 & 22 October & our Irish Conference in Dublin on 18 November. For more information about these events visit http://www.icsconferences.com

Speaking as someone from outside Dublin the idea that in order to get my change from Dublin bus I have to go to an office somewhere in the city in order to get the money they owe me is poor customer service. Imagine if your local supermarket started a system that required you to take your shopping receipts to their regional office in order to get your change. There would be uproar.

Also I had a run in with Vodafone over their “mobile internet”. I went into one of their shops and signed up for the option to surf the internet on my phone for 9.99 a month. When I got the largest phonebill in my history the following month I discovered that if you move from one system to another on their network you start incurring charges. This apparently can happen automatically depending on the signal strength and the settings on your phone. After numerous phone calls and e-mails I could not find anyone who was either able or interested in solving the problem for me and the shop assistant who had been so helpful in signing me up to the add-on now turned on the Manuel routine “I know nothing”. Eventually I just switched to O2 and would be very very slow to deal with vodafone again in the future.