Customer Service

Whatever has happened to customer service? I think during the boom years when there were more jobs than there were people wanting those jobs our employees acquired an attitude of not caring about customers. Fortunately our company hasn't had this problem. I think it is because the employees can see that the owners of the business really care about and bend over backwards to serve our customers. I think this might be true for many small businesses. To a small business the loss of just one customer can have a big impact so an employee who comes to work with a bad attitude and doesn't care about the customers wont be tolerated. My thoughts are of the bigger businesses.

Last night I needed some chorizo for the batch of chili beans I'm making today. I don't use the chorizo that comes in a tube. Try reading the ingredients some time. I have two stores I can shop at to get the good stuff. It was about 11:30 PM when I arrived at the store. I only saw one other customer while I was in there and at least three employees. I quickly grabbed four items and headed towards the front of the store to check out. As I walked across the front of the store to get to the checkout line I saw an employee of the grocery store walk from the checkout area to the door at the front of the store where the offices are. She disappeared through the door. I found the lane that was open and placed my four items on the conveyor belt and began to wait. As I stood there I could see two employees.

The first was a man who appeared to be in his late twenties. He was standing in front of the customer service desk using the telephone. He was dressed as if he worked in the back room and doesn't usually have to worry about being seen. After he hung up the phone he went around and appeared to be working but didn't seem to be doing anything. The most work he did was trying not to make eye contact with me.

The second employee was a man in his late fifties or sixties. He was taking items from a cart and putting them on them shelves. Occasionally he would pull out his price gun and put a price sticker on an item. He was very good at that. Once in a while he would look at me as I waited for someone to and accept my payment for things I had picked out then he would go back to what he was doing.

Since neither of these two people had any interest in helping me out I started to walk across the front of the store looking down the isles for someone who could run a cash register. After having no luck I said something to the man with the price gun. He walked up to the cash register and stood there starring at it as if he was looking for the instructions. At that point the girl who had gone into the office rushed back out and took over to ring up the sale.

The girl may have been in the bathroom which is understandable or she may have been sneaking a little break while I was standing there. My problem is with the other two employees who did everything they could to avoid any interaction with me instead of explaining to me that the wait would only be a few minutes or at least talking to me so that the wait didn't seem as long.

The point is, if you work in customer service in any form every time a customer or client walks away or hangs up the phone he/she should feel like they just had an amazing experience or they made a new friend. If you can't give them that feeling then maybe you should consider a career move. You could get a job on a farm or something where you don't have to deal with people. That would free up a migrant worker to go and start doing the paper work to become legal.