Neal and I have had several issues with customer service over the past few years, and when we married, we finally decided to start doing something about it. We are both big on customer service (within reason) and wonder why businesses these days seem to forget that the customer is how they make their money.
We are not the type of customers that we saw (and felt aghast about) at Home Depot a couple months ago when we decided to get our car keys copied for each other. A woman was ranting and raving on the phone to someone and then, when the salesperson she was yelling for just a few minutes prior actually came to help her, she put the salesperson on hold to continue griping about the lack of sales help to the person on the phone. In front of the salesperson. Who was there to help her. Within a few minutes. Then, when the salesperson finally got her to tell her what (in general) was needed, she kept asking the person on the phone what they needed (specifically) and was upset when the salesperson didn’t automatically know what type of replacement battery their cordless drill needed. When the customer refused to even answer what type of drill it was. Or what the battery looked like.
After the salesperson went off to find someone even more knowledgeable (because the customer’s ignorance was transferred onto the salesperson by the customer herself when what she wanted wasn’t known right now), the woman made a couple snide comments to us about sales help these days and “how hard was it to know what kind of battery her drill took?”
Yeah, lady. How hard is it to figure that out? Or maybe find out before you get there. Or, how about this: How hard is it to know what kind of drill you own when you arrive so you can actually get good service?
We’re not like this (and I actually ended up semi-apologizing for the woman when the first salesperson ended up being our cashier) and we try our best to find things ourselves, asking for help when we’re completely lost as to where something might be (such as the windshield washer fluid this summer that we went to pick up at a great price at Menard’s: It was nowhere near the car stuff section nor the other windshield washer fluid. I broke down and asked a salesperson, who directed me to the windshield washing fluid section or the main aisle, where we already knew it was not and had told him so. When I discovered several others wandering looking for the same stuff as well, I decided to ask yet another salesperson, who didn’t know either; however, he did ask someone else who did know and then led us directly to the fluid. At the front of the store. Without any on display and the entire supply boxed up with no identifying characteristics on the cartons.)
After several customer service issues, we decided we were going to be the type of people who actually recounted our customer service experiences back to the stores, restaurants, etc. that we frequented. We first spoke out about awful experiences that we had to a couple restaurants but soon realized that this wasn’t really as helpful to the company as our feedback could be in one main way: We were only reporting negative experiences, which meant that all the great customer service we experienced went unacknowledged.
We started sending feedback for excellent customer service, too. I’m disappointed to note that businesses are more likely to respond back to poor customer service than good service. Almost every business has at least responded with a short note about poor service but only one now has responded when we gave good customer service reviews. I find that a bit worrisome, actually.
This last place that we gave comments about good service to (actually, quite possibly the best service either of us has ever received in a restaurant) let us know that they would give our service provider special recognition, which I truly hope they do. We give the feedback to make service better (or to let them know when they have a “keeper” that they should recognize as a great provider of customer service, thereby giving them a good name in our eyes) and we honestly hope that it will. We are not always optimistic, as we realize that some people give bad feedback in order to receive coupons or free things. (To be completely upfront, we have received one discount coupon for a place we had atrocious service at–when we had to chase down someone to give us our bill after we hadn’t seen our server since she took our order [someone else brought our food]. We still haven’t used the coupon and we’ve had it for a couple months. We’re not sure if the coupon makes up for the extremely bad service and we’re a bit afraid to find out.) I’m afraid that the businesses where we give honest feedback on bad service will just feel that we’re trying to get something for nothing and that the businesses where we give good feedback will just toss it in the trash and not recognize those who are giving customers something so very rare these days:
Quality service.
What have OTHERS said in response?