Press one to end this madness

I am not sure which bank, airline, insurance company, supermarket check-out, IT helpdesk, Odeon cinema or TV channel is the worst, but one thing they have in common is that the interests of the consumer are not high on their list of priorities. In a week dominated by whether extravagant executive pay is justified, it is worth asking a more fundamental question.

Are corporate leaders so preoccupied with being lean and mean in the quest for short-term profitability that they have ceased to give a damn about their customers? What matters is the fat pay-off or underpriced share option, not the customer, whatever pious claims to the contrary may litter their mission statements and annual reports.

Everybody reading this column will have experienced that mix of rage, frustration and misery on dialling the fateful 0800 or 0845 number to receive the computerised 'press one, two, three etc' message, so beginning the time-consuming, perhaps hopeless, business of completing the transaction in question. My recent odyssey with NatWest when attempting to draw down the last part of my mortgage advance drove me to distraction. I explained my request to half- a-dozen representatives of the mortgage advances department, only to be redirected or not called back. I then had to go through the whole wretched business again, making the same request to another hapless operator and drawing the same blank. It is evident that their handbook can't handle anything other than basic requests.

But NatWest isn't alone. Requesting a Sky dish if your home is not absolutely standard is to descend into a world better described by Kafka, ending up with being invoiced for an installation that never took place and with subsequent threats of being sued for not paying for a service you never had. To wait in the telephone queue for an Odeon ticket on your mobile and then to lose the signal when you have climbed from the 12-minute to two-minute position is the ultimate in twenty-first century consumer frustration. And so it goes on. Being a consumer is an uphill and frequently unpleasant struggle.

In the 1970s, Times columnist Bernard Levin played his own small part in preparing the cultural ground for Thatcherism with his vignettes of the ghastly inefficiencies of nationalised industries and local authorities in servicing their customers. Now his targets would have to include most of our big, customer-facing private companies. Their business model is organised around distributing standard products produced in production silos with labour costs shaved to the bone, with very little thought given to whether they are really giving consumers satisfaction.

For all the free-market fundamental ist talk about how companies are accountable to their consumers, which makes them inherently superior to any public-service provider, our consumer experience is very different. At least we get to vote to protest about poor public services. In the private sector, our choice is a different queue or another wait at another indifferent call centre. Wasting our time costs the company nothing as it saves inventories and staff; that means higher short-term profits, bigger bonuses and share options for its executives.

This is what Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff and her husband, James Maxmin, former CEO of Volvo-UK, call modern capitalism's transaction crisis. In The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals , they argue that contemporary companies no longer serve consumers because they do not understand their changing character and what is wanted from consumption.

Companies define their task as the provision and distribution of products in which value is created within the enterprise's own production space, so that even when a company is selling a so-called customised product, it tries to standardise the production process to minimise costs and maximise margins. There is no relationship with the consumer; we are just expected to buy its offering and move on.

This was never good enough, argue Zuboff and Maxmin, but it is especially not good enough in an era when consumers want their individuality of character and specific needs respected. Indeed, the combination of greater wealth, decline in religious observance and greater access to higher education has made individuals more aware that achieving their well-being means securing the real services that they want from their spending.

Companies may create 'shareholder value' and enrich their directors from engineering their production and distribution systems around an efficiency of the organisation that is defined entirely in terms of its own needs, but the commoditised offerings that result no longer give consumers what they want and, therefore, real value. That, insist Zuboff and Maxmin, is now created in supporting individuals in how they live their lives and spend their cash.

What we want is 'deep support' in navigating our way through our lives, not a sequence of frustrating, time-consuming, misery-inducing one-off transactions which don't cater for our needs.

Zuboff and Maxmin are on to something and their remedy is radical. In future, the companies that succeed will be those that produce real consumer satisfaction by providing deep support for our spending choices , they say, even to the extent of only accepting payment for goods or services once the consumer has declared his or her full satisfaction.

Thus, a company's efforts will be shifted away from producing and associated transactional selling - that will become the preserve of federations of specialists which concentrate just on production; instead, companies will put all their efforts into supporting consumers as they choose and spend. The new paradigm, they argue, is the support economy.

If so, most British companies have a long way to travel - and are even now some way behind the public sector. The debate about foundation hospitals, localism, earned autonomy and improved public-service delivery is, in truth, a debate about how the public sector can provide Zuboff and Maxmin's deep support and move away from unsatisfactory, low-quality transactions, a debate which has not begun in the private sector.

Empowering consumers so they get deep support would mean asking whether executives in the private sector earning millions of pounds are leading companies that really serve their consumers, to which the answer is almost invariably 'No'. In the public sector, making payments conditional on individual consumers signalling their satisfaction would be the most radical reform of all.

But there is a more profound conclusion still. Zuboff and Maxmin's book is another in the growing literature (John Kay's The Truth About Markets , Adair Turner's Just Capital , Michael Porter's report to the DTI, even my The World We're In ) that challenges the accepted wisdom that the American corporation, shareholder value and a fundamentalist view of markets represent the last word on enterprise and consumer satisfaction.

Lived experience is changing how we think about the world. It can't be long before that radically affects how we act.