Retail ambassadors
15 July 2025July 2025. I have just found out that a well-known firm of surveyors has re-hired someone whose reputation is awful. I doubt I am the only one who has been on the receiving end of his nastiness and, so I am told, not the only one who has expressed concern about the re-hiring.
When a surveyor represents a retailer, the surveyor is an ambassador for that retailer. Anything the surveyor says and does represents that retailer. It is the retailer’s decision to instruct and the firm’s duty of care to ensure that the surveyor dealing with the matter complements the retailer’s relationship with its customers.
Multiple retailers might like to imagine that they can afford to lose customers, in the mass market there are sure to be enough new customers to make up the difference. But retailing is fiercely competitive, and social media influential. If a customer has been badly treated or let down, it won’t take long for hundreds possibly thousands of other customers to get to hear about it.
In business, a difference exists between customers and ‘profitable’ customers. A profitable customer is someone who, regardless of the competition and competitors, is loyal to the particular retailer. For example, when John Lewis Partnership went wrong in changing its credit card provider to New Day, it lost hundreds of profitable customers. In my case, for example, instead of JLP being the first port of call for most purchases, it lost 50 years of loyalty.
For a rent review, the parties’ surveyors do not start off by exchanging a list of retailers with whom they are regular customers; that’s personal and irrelevant. But it becomes relevant if something happens during negotiations to make one think do I really want to continue spending money with this retailer if its surveyor is the sort of person the retailer thinks a suitable ambassador. Currently, for example, an in-house surveyor for a group company of the same retailer as the nasty experience 20 years ago has become so aggressive that I am relieved not to have spent any money with the retailer since. Possibly, the surveyor years ago did not think for one moment there was anything I could have done about it. Wrong. I wrote in my newsletter and on my website and by the time the retailer requested enough, thousands of people, including directors and owners of multiple retailers, would have read about it.
The awful situation arose as a result of the surveyor’s emphatic nil increase which, because I disagreed, sparked his tantrum. On referral, an increase. The aggression above because of my refusal to negotiate by an in-house surveyor’s rules.
Fortunately, such experiences are rare. Nowadays, if anything like that were to happen then, as well as writing on my newsletter website and on LinkedIn, I’d report the surveyor to the RICS for breach of core principles. I’d also write to the retailer’s CEO and suggest something be done urgently to stop it happening again.
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