Ahhh a little banter about Customer Service being KING, it almost comes at the perfect time especially since I am coming off of one of the worst customer service issues I have dealt with in a long time. I was sitting here getting ready to go through some of my blog stuff and clean some things up when I thought about Customer Service today as a whole and thought I would write about it.
It’s no secret that so many people feel that in todays day and age Customer Service is at an all time low, It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to point out the obvious I think it’s clear everywhere you go the service sucks compared to where it was 5 years ago. Think about it, Cashiers don’t say, “Thank you” anymore when your at Home Depot, Publix, Wal Mart, a Conveneint store or just about anywhere else, instead the customer ends up saying, “Thank you.” and in many cases the employee doesn’t aknowledge the customer at all. I wont be the first one to say it but I will say it loud and clear, How fucking hard is it to say thank you to someone? How hard is it to say have a nice day? I mean it’s not like it cost anything to speak words to someone, stop being such a damn loser and say thank you to your customers when they come in.
Now owning Indoor Tanning Salons and a having a few of them doesn’t allow for Nate, Lisa, Michele or myself to be in the salons constantly and deal with every customer on a one on one basis. Instead we rely on trying to hire the best possible people for the right position, this hardly means that my salons are perfect or even close to the way I would like them to be. Let’s face it I have over 20 years of retail experience, I have been saying , “Thank you” and “Have a nice day” to customers for a very long time and I was brought up in a Home Depot Company at a time when their main focus was on Customer Service. Shit I can remember a time when you couldn’t walk past a customer without saying hello to them in the aisle. That level of service has been something I have come to expect in my own business’s as well as from the business’s I deal with on a personal level. Now when I walk through aisles I can’t even find humans and the one’s I do find seem to search for a peice of the racking that they can hide behind. It’s not just Home Depot it’s everywhere people and it’s fuckin sickening.
I can remember not being allowed to tell a customer, “No”, shit you couldnt even say the word period. I can remember giving away $30,000 kitchens because the customer hated the color of the cabinets. Sure thats huge business but I can also tell you that owning Indoor Tanning salons that my Vice President knows to take care of the customer PERIOD. If it gets to me I will more than take care of the customer so it might as well get resolved right from go. Unlike some of the business’s I have been dealing with lately that reality doesn’t seem to exist, never would I have ever written a customer a nasty or threatening email, regardless of how pissed off they were about something…. In todays day and age I can easily name 5 small business that will never become BIG business’s simply based on the fact that their customer service SUCKS.
Taking care of the customer can be a challenge sometimes but thats life, if your a small business owner than to be honest you signed up for this shit. No one begged you to open a business no one will care when your gone either, there’s a lot more game on the block these days and sitting around hoping that one company will figure out what customer service is, is nothing more than a waste of time. if you applied for a job in a customer related industry (retail, service related) or whatever else, than no one forced you through the front door like in China to show up for work… You made the choice, either take care of customers (who by the way are people just like you) or find a factory job or some other bullshit to do where you don’t have to deal with the public and no one cares if you take care of them or not.
I can write about customer service and the lack of for days, I know at this point in the game I can’t make a difference it’s not like people will read this crap and make a life altering change but the least I can do is write about it and hope my kids read it one day and respect the customers they get the chance to serve and hopefully at least keep the customer service dream alive.
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