Some time ago, I was in a court case as an expert witness. The advocate gave me a number to call him. It was his wife’s cellphone number; he said it was no good me calling his cellphone because it was switched off, as the press never stopped calling him and he thought they may be bugging his phone.

Similarly, these days, if you give out your email, you can expect a flood of garbage from people trying to sell you things. So, it is just as wise to have two emails, one of which you do not give out much.

The result is that it is now nearly impossible to contact anybody with any authority in various organisations. I am currently dealing with a motor vehicle dealer who sold me a second-hand bakkie, which, after it had been driven for two weeks, broke down, was repaired, broke down again and has been at the dealer for a year. Yes, one year. The vehicle is Indian in original design. After the dealer had had it for three months, I tried to phone whoever the dealer had as a boss. No success. I tried the Motor Industry Ombudsman. No success. All I got was to be stuck in the endless loop of ‘Your call is important to us; please stay on the line to speak to the next available agent . . .’, and we all know what decisive power the agent will have when the call is answered, if ever. The same recently happened with a courier company. The company has our parcels – it has had them for weeks but it does not send them to us. The company’s ‘customer service’ is a joke. A very bad joke.

All this reminds me of two stories, both true. When I was a student, I would go back to Johannesburg each vacation. My father was very fond of red wine. So, as a present for his birthday, I saved up and bought six bottles of Simonsig red wine from Simonsig wine farm and took them to Johannesburg. My father and I tasted the bottles. Three were rubbish. Three were brilliant. I was very disappointed and took one of the rubbish bottles back to the farm. They would not compensate me. They said that once opened, the wine would deteriorate anyway – no point in them tasting it. Right. I was just a student to them. So wah. I am now 62 years old. I am sure that my red wine spend is about the equivalent of R3 000 a month. I have not bought a bottle of Simonsig in the last 44 years. Do the math.

Similarly, I was once a Ford man. I always had Fords, as did my father. In 1984, my 60 000 km Ford Sierra camshaft broke in half. The dealer dismissed my argument of ‘latent defects’ and made me pay to replace it. Four weeks later, it broke again. They again made me pay. Since then, I have not bought another Ford.

My point is this: the most important thing in business is to resolve any complaints about your product and make the customer happy. Yes, we all know there are those who are just chancers, but they are not in the majority. Customers provide you with a wonderful thing: a free evaluation service of your staff. Keep track of complaints and you can weed out the incompetent. But if you are so far up the structure that nobody can even get to you or if you really really think that customer relations are best handled by some nunu in a call centre . . . you may never know it but your customer base is leaking away like water from faulty plumbing – undetected, unnoticed, but relentless. If you are a boss, I urge you to get a great complaints resolutions department. Staff it with active, highly paid people. You will be astonished to find that your customer base will get better and bigger and your business will thrive. It is not about spending huge sums on advertising to get new customers; it is about hanging on to the ones you have.