Customer Service

Recently during a conversation about a situation where I had received indifferent, if not terrible, customer service, a former co-worker bemoaned the need to have to provide good customer service. Understand that, as someone who toiled for many years in the retail world, I have no sympathy for rude and unreasonable customers. My patience for people who are insulting and demeaning to retail workers ran out long ago. The flip side of that is that, as a customer, I don't expect retail clerks to be overly attentive, to fawn over me or even to pretend to like me, but I do expect a business to provide the goods or services that they are in the business of selling at the price advertised and for their employees to treat me with a modicum of respect. Part of this involves taking responsibility for what goes on within their four walls. Of course, there are things that happen that are outside a store's control: availability of stock, weather, dependability of suppliers and the like.

The specific incident that caused our disagreement involved a rebate offer. Of course I was aware that the product that I bought was supplied by a local distributor who in turn bought it from the manufacturer and that the rebate was processed by a rebate processing center. I bought several items based on the store's advertising that I would receive a $10 rebate for buying a certain product & mailing in the UPC codes and my receipt. My rebate request was denied. Since I had spent my money, not a the redemption center, or with the manufacturer or even with the distributor, but at the local store, it was the local store where I lodged my complaint. In over four months and multiple emails complaining I never once heard from anyone at the local store. To be somewhat fair to them (even though I'm not naming them) they evidently had contracted the manufacturer since eventually I received by $10 (plus some free stuff) from the manufacturer. However, I shouldn't have had to wait four months and be treated as if this was not the store's problem.

Good customer service starts with assuming, not that the customer is always right, but that an individual customer, when presenting a complaint, has a legitimate grievance and that it is the duty of the retailer to "fix it". Good customer service continues with taking total responsibility for what goes on in your store, not by passing the buck to suppliers or delivery agents.

Years ago one of my supervisors pointed out the tiny percentage of sales that refunds represented, and assuming that refund requests that weren't legitimate, i.e. scams, were a small percentage of that, we concluded that the odds were overwhelmingly small that a refund request was a "rip-off" attempt. Unless we were absolutely sure that what the customer wanted was fraudulent, they got what they wanted. We reasoned that getting stolen from occasionally was a small price to pay to avoid making angry a customer who had a legitimate complaint.

Another idea that this same supervisor had was to guarantee that our shelves would be full during the holiday season. The easy way was to just accept the excuse that "the warehouse was out", instead we called every other store in the chain to see if they had any excess of what we needed and even went to competitors to clear out their shelves!

If you're in the customer service business you shouldn't be resentful that you "have to" honor your commitments to your customers. By all means be angry that you have to put up with the rude people, the nasty people, the people who treat you like an indentured servant - no one should have to put up with any of that. But if providing people with the goods and services that you say that you're providing is a chore, perhaps you're in the wrong business.