Service please: Are our standards really that bad?

With the state of service in the UK under the TV spotlight as never before, is it really as bad as it seems? Alice Wyllie goes in search of the reality behind the cash tills and restaurant tables

• Students at the the Tennent's Training Academy in Glasgow. Picture: Robert Perry

'WELL can't you see we dinnae have any?" That was the incredulous response of the employee behind the meat counter at my local branch of a certain monster supermarket chain when I asked her for two rashers of streaky bacon. I didn't fare much better at the deli counter when I requested some goats cheese. "Cheese comes from cows," was the equally sullen response. Then there was the call-centre worker who hung up on me when I got irate, the waiter who threw his hands in the air in exasperation when I couldn't decide which table I wanted, and the staff who spent more time flirting behind the bar than they did bringing me my drink. And that's all in the past month.

Just last week a shop assistant managed to process my entire transaction while saying the following to her colleague: "The first thing I said when my wean popped out of me was, 'He'd better not be ginger. Cos if he's a ginge you can shove him back in.'"

Yes, the UK doesn't have the best reputation for outstanding customer service, and each of us has our own horror stories: waiters who roll their eyes at the simplest of requests, shop assistants filing their nails, barmen who pay more attention to their iPhone than to their customers.

Attitudes in the UK are often contrasted to those in countries like the US, Italy and France, where working in service industries – particularly in hospitality – is seen as a respected career, and staff train for years to learn how to deal with customers.

This contrast became evident to Michelin-starred chef Michel Roux Jr when he noted he employed only one British person among his mainly French front-of-house staff. And so he went about training a group of inexperienced young people on the finer points of hospitality on the BBC2 series Michel Roux's Service. Tonight, viewers will see the results of his endeavours as he picks two of the trainees to work for him in his London restaurant, Le Gavroche.

Roux isn't the only one banging on about the state of the service industry. That doyenne of retail, Mary Portas, is currently fronting Mary Portas: Secret Shopper on Channel 4, in which she goes undercover to expose the state of customer service in some of the biggest chains on the high street.

So does the UK deserve its reputation? Absolutely not, says Michelin-starred chef Paul Kitching, who runs 21212 in Edinburgh. "The service you find in the UK is as good as anywhere in the world," he says. "Not only that, but I tend to find it a warmer, more giving approach. I eat out in Edinburgh four times a week and I find that wherever I go I'm met with a smile. When I employ staff, I don't look at how many Michelin-starred restaurants they've worked in, but at how friendly they are, if they've got a good sense of humour. I can handle a glass being broken, or cutlery being dropped – we all make mistakes – but it's an arrogant approach which I can't stand, and that's one thing you rarely come across in UK restaurants."

There appears to be a trend in high-end establishments towards an emphasis on friendliness over stuffy formality when it comes to service, a less traditional approach – one less common in similarly exclusive establishments on mainland Europe. Some five-star hotels now call customers by their first names, or like to share a joke with guests.

Carina Svensen, the general manager at Hotel Missoni in Edinburgh, says: "Our vision is to be the friendliest hotel in the world. We're not trying to clone people, and we don't want service to feel forced. Our customers expect our staff to be able to help them, without always having to pass them on to another member of staff, which is why everyone is sent on a guided tour of Edinburgh, so they can advise guests about the city. It's the little touches which keep customers coming back. Today a guest ripped her dress in our bar just as she was about to go out to a big event. One of the staff noticed that she was the same dress size as the customer and sent a taxi to pick up one of her own dresses from home to loan to her for the evening."

Such examples of exceptional service sadly seem less common than the horror stories. But then it may be true what they say, that if you have a good experience you tell three people, but if you have a bad one, you tell 30. That has perhaps never been more true than today when the internet has given customers the power to make their thoughts on shoddy service known like never before. Sites like TripAdvisor, which allows customers to review their holiday experiences, and Qype, which does the same for restaurants, give the customer an outlet to complain about their bad experiences.

The power of word of mouth persists, however. In one restaurant, when ordering dessert, a friend was told without apology that she would have to go to another table to eat it to make room for more customers. When she told me of her experience, I swiftly cancelled the reservation I had just made for the same restaurant.

Staff in the UK are often accused of having a lack of training, or little dedication to their craft, with many people viewing the industry as merely a stopgap for them, weekend work, or a student job as opposed to a fulfilling career.

At a meeting of the Scottish Tourism Forum last year, chef Shirley Spear, of the Three Chimneys restaurant on Skye, said she was struggling to find employees. Projections are for 95,000 new jobs in tourism by 2017 but, she said: "There's a danger there will be nobody to work in 2014. The whole of Scotland is crying out for a level of committed, impassioned young people. There are more and more college courses on the go now, all supposedly connected to tourism, but what we need are courses connected to the hospitality side of tourism, like waiters. If we don't have the service side of the industry right, the rest will go down the tube."

Spear's call may have been answered, in the form of the Tennent's Training Academy in Glasgow, which opened in November, offering students the opportunity to learn the finer points of customer service across the hospitality industry.

"If you have bad food coming out of the kitchen you can get away with it if you have good service," says Alan Jones, the director of the academy. "The customer can accept that. However, if you have good food and very bad service, the customer won't accept it."

In one room, a class of door staff learn how to greet customers.

They're told to stand to the side of the door, not in front of it, to appear less intimidating, a refreshing contrast to the usual surly grunt customers are often greeted with. And they're repeatedly reminded that they might be one of the few points of contact for a customer in a busy bar or club, so interaction is key.

Next door, students learn the finer points of serving wine. They're told to make judgments about what the customer might want based on appearance, age, gender. They're shown how to tell when the customer wants "a bit of theatre" and how to recognise that they want to be left alone with minimum interaction with the staff.

In yet another room, bar staff are being trained on how to pull the perfect pint. In addition to technical points about how to get the perfect head on a beer, it's drummed into them that they have to make eye contact with the customer, that they should chat to them while their pint is being poured and that they should acknowledge them the moment they walk into the bar, even if they can't be served immediately.

"Just talking to people is hugely important," explains Jones. "That sounds easy, but the number of staff and even managers I come across who can't talk to people is amazing. When you go into a pub and stand in a bar and people ignore you, I hate that. It doesn't matter how busy it is, we try to train people that some kind of acknowledgement is essential. They might be the most technically-minded mixologist, but if they can't communicate with the customer, it's a waste of time and that customer won't come back."

It's not just the hospitality industry which is under the spotlight at the moment. Mary Portas – who has made her name hauling shoddy retailers over the coals for bad practice – has been taking high-street shops to task for poor customer service by donning a wig and taking a secret camera into shops from Pilot to Primark. She describes the industry as "a faceless couldn't-give-a-monkey's business." Certainly if her undercover footage – which would make Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served? reach for her smelling salts – is to be believed, she's not far off the mark. She encounters monosyllabic staff who send her to other shops, ignore her, give her incorrect information and gossip amongst themselves. One member of staff goes on about how much credit she's got left on her mobile phone when she's supposed to be serving a customer.

But it's not all folded arms and unhelpful staff in retail, and there are many boutiques and chains which pride themselves on high standards of service. John Lewis has won numerous awards for its customer service, and Hazel Tierney, the operations manager at John Lewis in Edinburgh, says that making the customer happy is vital.

"Good product knowledge and the ability to give impartial advice is a key element of our customer service," she says. "We talk about 'moments of truth' which are the times when a member of staff is able to go that little bit further to give a customer great service. That might mean taking them to the department they're looking for, or ensuring that they're always acknowledged. We find that customers are looking for interaction from staff. They like it when we can have a joke with them or really engage with them, and it's a real buzz for us to see them leave satisfied. That's what makes us happy, and at the end of the day it's what makes the customer keep coming back."