Did you see the viral video on the news of the Frontier Airlines customer service representative who refused to check in a ticket holding passenger to their flight? The passenger arrived 50 minutes before the flight instead of the required hour early, and wasn’t happy about having to pay an additional $25 charge – but still pulled out his credit to pay. The Frontier employee literally refused to do her job, and the passenger missed the flight.
Left work yesterday at 6 pm. Was going to stop by Taco Bell but it was closed, probably due to the poor customer service. The Taco Bell / KFC down the road didn’t participate on the Taco Bell app. I stopped at Dollar Tree – more bad customer service. Not the first time. By then it was after 630 and I didn’t feel like driving out of my way to a different Taco Bell. Made it home at 705 and had a delicious supper of leftovers: Matthew’s cheesy jasmine rice, Ceil’s Mexican casserole, and a baked potato.
Man how the world has changed since I started working. Used to be that the customer was always right – especially from my position as a customer service representative. My job is not to be the bad guy. That’s for the managers over me. Sure the customer’s forecast may have been wrong. Maybe they forgot to order, or the need for an item just came up. Just like with personal relationships, it doesn’t do any good to remind the customer of their mistake. Our customer buys 95% of their metal from us - $50 million a year. We even sell them paint. It’s better for us to jump through hoops to get them what they need than to make them want to look elsewhere for material. To let another supplier in the door would give them the opportunity to take business away from us.
Some people who didn’t come up in sales can forget this. There so much more push back with the customer these days. For sure if it costs more to get them what they need quickly, certainly its fair to pass those costs along to them. My company handed out bracelets that say “SAY YES AND FIGURE IT OUT”. If the customer orders something and I sent a little bit of material one mile down the road, and then the fabricator will take 2 weeks to drill out the part, then we have to ship it to the plater for another week’s worth of processing before it ships to the customer – well it the little bit of material has just delivered when the customer wanted to cancel the order, I wouldn’t force the customer to not be able to cancel the order if they realized they didn’t need it. Sure it might be a little bit of extra work for me to cancel the order and bring the material back, but why cause the driller and the plater to take up time processing unwanted material when they could be working on other items they need? Instead of “teaching the customer a lesson” it’s going to leave a negative taste in their mouth, perhaps prompting the customer to buy what they need from somewhere else.
Some people need to listen to Clark Howard, to hear how he treats customers, how he answers dumb questions over and over. All that said, for sure management has turned a blind eye to how much more work this new computer system is. We did add more people out in the plant, and more people in inside sales and fabrication and the IQ Team, whatever that is. But no more people to help out with the tubing, or with our team. Not sure they understand all the extra work involved. Sales might be down 35%, but it takes just as much work to make and bill out 65 parts than it does a hundred.
I keep trying to remember Philippians 2:3-8: “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind count others as more important than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who though he existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, be becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross”.
I’ve spent the last week with 30-40 emails on my To Do list. Nice to be able to get the number down under 30, almost to 25. It never ends. Now back up to 35, and I neglected some time sensitive work I needed to do delay, that coworkers are waiting on. Maybe tomorrow.
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