The Sweet Service Award goes to Mercedes Benz Culemborg, and their car service booking executive Karen, for her excellent service in organising a replacement pair of windscreen wipers immediately, so that I could drive to the workshop to have them fitted within an hour of calling.  A loose fitting windscreen wiper arm was tightened when it was found that it was not wiping the windscreen on one side. A strong smell of oil, due to another supplier not closing the oil filter cap properly, was fixed as well, without an extra charge.  Karen was previously at the Century City branch, where she gave excellent service too.

The Sour Service Award goes to the V&A Waterfront management, for its lack of response to our Tweets about the poor quality of the new Ladies’ cloakroom which has been moved across the upstairs passage next door to Fabiani.  The previous ladies cloakroom has been closed to create a new shop. The new (ex-Gents) cloakroom is one-quarter the size of the previous Ladies’ cloakroom. Transformation into the Ladies’ loos was incomplete, with tiling not finished, the loo door was sticking, not openable from inside, and there was no toilet paper at 19h00 on 10 April, and the cleaner seemed uncertain as to where she could find more. The toilets were very dirty. Angry men were standing in the passage, looking for their cloakroom, nowhere to be seen nor was it signposted.  When shared with the V&A, the Marketing head Chantelle Cole responded as follows: ‘Thank you for highlighting this with us and I’m sorry to hear about your unpleasant experience. It’s particularly helpful that you have given us a specific time of the incident; we are investigating this further with the shift manager, to understand why it was in this condition. Our maintenance team had already snagged the issues you highlighted regarding the door sticking and the tiles needing replacement; the tiles were damaged during the conversion and will be replaced at night, when the mall is quieter. As you point out, there are only four cubicles and so we opted to have all four operational, rather than close this one to allow for the repairs.  We’re doing a number of exciting changes, including expanding the store space for Superdry and Markhams. To accommodate these extensions, we have had to close one of the toilets. We are building new men and ladies’ toilets near the Post Office, which will be opened in the next few months. We appreciate it has resulted in some inconvenience and we hope our visitors are understanding of this short-term impact. We have prominent signage in place regarding the location of alternate men’s toilets and have signposted the upcoming conversion for the past few weeks in the lead up to this changeover. Thank you again for highlighting this issue and apologies that your tweet was not responded to. This should not have happened and I have discussed this with our social media team, so we don’t have this experience again’.

When replying and asking why the Ladies’ Cloakroom was opened for use whilst substandard and why the signage was so poor, contrary to the V&A’s reply, Ms Cole wrote back, without answering the substandard question, and gave a classic non-Customer Care response to the signage question: ‘Your feedback is noted; yours is the only complaint we’ve received on signage and we have tested it with a few people however we will continue to monitor this’ !  A visit to the ladies’ cloakroom last night (2 May), three weeks later, found the toilet cubicles still untiled, and three basins leaking!

The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog.  Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at info@whalecottage.com.   Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales newsletters on the www.whalecottage.com website.