Back in January, Which, the UK Consumer Association published a customer satisfaction survey looking at high street retailers in the grocery, clothing and electrical sectors. The results of the survey were also reported on Watchdog on the BBC.

The results were interesting, particularly in the electrical sector, where established big names such as PC World, Comet, Dixons and Powerhouse were soundly beaten by local specialists and John Lewis. Indeed the big names were even beaten by Asda and Tesco. Indeed in the categories of Product, Customer Service and In-Store Experience, John Lewis is significantly ahead of everybody else. Although we’ve not bought electrical goods from them in the past, Mum and Dad got their last Mac from them, indeed if you’re not close to an Apple Store or specialist Apple dealer, I’d always recommend getting a Mac from them as in my experience the salesmen, unlike PC World, know what they are talking about when it comes to the Mac.

Anyway, for the first time since the survey, we were looking to buy something electrical – in this case something to record speaking for both Beth’s classes at school, and also to provide evidence for her upcoming portfolio training. She’d initially been thinking of getting some sort of MP3 player with a recording facility, although she really had no use for an MP3 player. However, since it has struck me that with most MP3 players the voice recording is an add-on, it would make more sense to look at a proper voice recorder, where it has actually been built for the purpose. This seemed to be backed by a number of the guides to producing podcasts that recommended having a good digital voice recorder, and a number of them pointed us towards various units in the Olympus Range. From a trawl around the internet I found that John Lewis stocked the whole range, so since Beth wasn’t totally sure, we decided to go into Reading and take a look. Looking at the features we required, we knew the requirements for what it needed to record, plus it needed to be able to connect to both a PC, and to the Mac for transferring the recordings.

So off we went to Reading. I’d already established roughly the model I though we needed, and the helpful salesman listened to what we needed, and showed us the relevant model. At no time did he attempt to sell us a flashier model in the range, nor did we get someone attempting to sell us an extended warranty either. In fact it was an all round good experience. The computer department had both PC and Mac models, and knowledgeable salesmen – indeed it was noticeable that whilst most of the staff on a Saturday at PC World tend to make me feel old, there was much more of a mix of ages at John Lewis, and certainly from what I overheard of some of the other conversations with people looking at computers, pretty knowledgeable. I have to say that at times when I pop in to PC World I really feel tempted to intervene when I hear some of the things the salesmen say to the customers – no such problems here.

Certainly, after that experience we’ll be going along to John Lewis again next time we need something electrical.