Customer Service

30 June 2025

Jun 2025 – Complain… is not something I do very often. Mostly, there’s nothing much to complain about. Specialising in rent review enables considering holistically, not only from the client’s perspective. There are at least two sides to a story. So when I complain occasionally, I always include some suggestions for what can be done to ensure the situation does not reoccur.

I’d like to think my approach is appreciated by the recipient, usually the CEO of the company. I rarely contact customer services. Customer services is a “barrier” whose function is to shield the CEO from getting involved with the public face of the organisation or business. Contacting the CEO direct is much more likely to elicit a constructive response than wasting time dealing with lower levels of pay grades. Long ago, whilst acting for a local trader tenant of a small unit on an upper floor of Lakeside Shopping Centre, I wrote to the landlord’s figurehead director, Baroness x, explained the position and asked for her help. Soon after, instructions from the top unblocked the resistance I had encountered in dealing with the surveyors.

I wish I could say the same of the RICS. Finding the contact details for the President and anyone on the presidential team is difficult. You’d think, at least I would, that an organisation that wants to be regarded as a “centre for excellence” would be outfacing and whose top people would respond to messages either personally or through a personal assistant. Perhaps the scandal in 2019 – involving allegations of suppressed financial reports, mismanagement of funds, a power struggle between senior executives and non-executive directors, which led to Alison Levitt KC (whom the RICS had appointed to carry out a review) in her conclusion that the RICS executive “hid behind the governance structure when it was convenient, but circumvented it for much of the rest of the time” – is continuing?

I should think it very difficult for anyone helping to run a membership organisation whose role in the property market is not statutory. and whose influence is limited to requiring its members to spread the word, to be as customer-friendly as a commercial business.

In most large organisations, change is at a snail’s pace. A rowing boat can turn on a sixpence, a big ship turning circle can be half-a-mile. So as an adviser to landlords and tenants whose interests the RICS wants to serve, despite not having been asked, perhaps I am expecting too much, or too soon, that it would take any notice of anything glaringly obvious that would help improve standards.

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