I sit here writing this, surrounded by potential danger. Muslim fundamentalists are ready to blow me up at the first opportunity, swine flu is lurking waiting to infect me, criminals armed with knives and guns are an everpresent danger to anyone who steps out of their front door ( and many who don't), and somewhere out in space a big chuck of rock is on its way to smash into the earth and plunge us all into a new ice age. We can however relax, safe in the knowledge that our wonderful government is tackling at least one of these problems.

In the future, criminals will not be able to use toy guns to frighten people when they rob them. How has the government achieved this miracle? Simple really, toys guns can now only be manufactured in blue plastic. What a stunningly effective idea. If someone points a gun at you in the future and it is blue, you will know that it is not real. Of course there are other problems this creates, I mean obviously the government has also banned the sale of black paint, because some criminal mastermind might get the idea of painting their blue gun black and it will then look just like a toy gun that has been made out of black plastic! I now need to swap my black car in, because if I scratch it I won't be able to buy paint to touch it up.

It's strange though, I haven't seen any announcements in the news about black paint being banned, and the highly paid government experts won't have just ordered guns to be made in blue and not thought to ban black paint, would they?

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Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. DONALD PORTER

One of our many lines is pre packaged tubs of candy floss and popcorn which we sell quite a lot of. The product itself is quite inexpensive, however it is very bulky and consequently expensive to post to our customers. Because of this we try many different parcel companies, always trying to find the best and most cost effective form of transporting our product to our customer. Recently we came across a new company we hadn't used, this is called INTERLINK. They were able to beat all of our existing couriers by a comfortable margin, especially where multiple boxes going to the same address was concerned. The reason they are so cheap is because they are no bloody good.

On Thursday we booked a set of parcels in to be collected and delivered overnight to an address in North Wales. Unfortunately the parcel was not collected on Thursday. Now this is something which happens frequently with every firm we have ever used. I consequently went on to Interlinks website to register this problem. There is however no telephone contact number, you have to fill in an email form. I duly did this and received the answer that my query was being passed to the relevant department. That was on Friday morning, by Saturday I had still heard nothing and so repeated the process, receiving another confirmation that the relevant department would contact me. We are now on Monday, some 5 days after the parcel was due to be collected and it is still sitting on my office floor, so I have again tried to contact Interlink, guess what, the relevant department is going to get in touch with me!

The parcel has now been booked in with another delivery firm, so I will see how they do, in the meantime I have requested a refund from Interlink and am now timing exactly how long they are going to take from my initial email to when they actually contact me, as I think they are on course to set some kind of customer service record. I don't as the title of this piece states, expect Interlink to be perfect, but I do expect customer services to get in touch with me in under a week, especially when the product they are selling is overnight delivery!

Contrast this with my experience of another customer service department. We purchased a DELL laptop for my daughter for Christmas. A few days ago she told me that it was not charging up. Upon examination, where she had repeatedly pulled the charging plug out by the cable instead of the plug, the strain relief had come apart and a wire pulled out of the plug. I visited Dells website to order a new charger, however the array of possible options left me a little confused. So rather that ordering the wrong product I contacted their live chat helpline. A very friendly young lady based in the States contacted me within seconds, and after a few minutes debate informed we that as the product wasn't very old they would replace it for me free of charge. Not only that but it would be delivered overnight. Right enough the next morning it rolled up before lunch. About an hour later I received a phone call from customer services at Dell UK to check that I had received the charger and that it as working correctly.

Guess which of the 2 companies above I am more likely to use again.

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“The art is not in making money, but in keeping it” Proverb

This is turning out to be one incredible year. We are on average receiving bookings at about 5 times the rate of last year which is brilliant. We are seeing large amounts of repeat business which is brilliant. We are working with loads of events companies and wedding planners which is brilliant. We have an unbelievable amount of paperwork to work through which is bloody awful, as I do the bulk of it.

One thing which really annoys me is chasing payments up from companies which have the resources to pay us on time without any problems. I can accept that sometimes smaller companies or individuals need to hang on to their cash reserves as they are constantly juggling things around, but when national or multinational companies occupy hours of my time chasing up overdue accounts it makes my blood boil. One example was a client we worked for in March, which happened to be part of a major chain of BMW/MINI dealerships. Whilst negotiating the equipment they wanted us to supply our emails were answered within minutes. Once the job was complete our emails were met with a resounding silence. Eventually I sent a final demand by post with the declaration that after 7 days we would be filing a claim with the court services. This produced a result, a rather snotty member of the administration team phoned me to request a copy of the invoice, he seemed rather put out at my temerity in threatening legal action. After sending an invoice again and waiting another fortnight, I filed a claim with Her Majesty's online money claims service. This was done on a Monday morning. The court will have delivered a copy of my claim to the dealership on Tuesday, and lo and behold, on Wednesday I received my cheque for the outstanding amount plus court costs.

Now the fact that they did not contest this meant that they accepted they owed me this money. The fact that they paid it instantly under threat of litigation meant that they could afford to pay it to me. So why did it take 3 months and a court claim to actually get it. Obviously they won't ever use me again as I began court proceedings against them, and obviously I would not ever work for them again as you have to sue them to get paid, so why did things reach that point?

I have to say the online courts service is brilliant, I have used it 4 times this year to good effect each time, and now we have altered our accounts systems so that we use it sooner rather than later.

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