Customer Service

Service ? - Yea right !

Most people in business consider themselves to be really good at customer service, when the truth is that they often have no idea what good Customer Service is.

Many businesses view their businesses from the inside out where internal procedures and processes are always more important than dealing with customers. You only have to wait at a supermarket service counter to see this in action.

The other day I was waiting to pay for a newspaper, at one such "service desk".

There were four staff members behind the counter and one was dealing with a client attempting a telephone recharge transaction and watching them was a comedy of errors. The client I think might have been speaking Greek while the hapless staff member was speaking German. Somehow the service agent could not get his head around which telephone service this transaction was supposed to be for.

The nett result was that a supervisor had to be called to unscramble the mess. Great service, don't you think ?

But is gets worse, two of the other staff members were engaged in some administrative activities doing paperwork, yup its beats attending to a customer every time.

The fourth member of staff was having a conversation with other staff members on the far side of the service desk and oblivious to the line of people at the service counter.

Now for the surprise, having a supervisor resolving a problem one would kind of expect that they would notice this state of affairs, nope, you would be wrong. Once the problem transaction was resolved the supervisor took a look around and left but this was not the end yet. The person having messed up the transaction in the first place, used this opportunity to also leave the service desk, leaving a line of people twiddling their thumbs.

The store manager probably believe that they are delivering great service, no doubt based on "feedback" from the supervisors.