A survey by Retail Eyes of over 5000 shoppers has found that mobile phone retailers (that’s phone shops to you and me), perform the poorest in terms of customer satisfaction. Just 2% of customers said they were satisfied, whereas 27% of hotel customers were happy with the service. The phone retailers fared slightly better than petrol stations (0.8% satisfaction) who were ranked the poorest.

Anyone who’se been into a phone shop will understand why they performed so poorly. They are often unable to explain price packages correctly and push for the most expensive handset/monthly subscription. As a frequent traveller, I always ask about roaming and international call and text costs. Most of the time the shop assistant can’t tell me. ‘Look at our website’ was the response from one retail outlet for O2. I did, and the website still couldn’t tell me.

Having said that, I don’t want to label phone shop staff as the ‘new estate agents’. I have, very occasionally, got a good experience from a shop. The last time was when I had to buy mobile broadband. The woman at the shop explained the packages very carefully and I got a good deal as a result of that.

However, clearly that experience is the exception and not the rule, given the report Retail Eyes.