| In part two of this not so exciting travelogue surrounding our ill-fated, yet still enjoyable, trip to Las Vegas our fearless writer (who now fears only two things Swordfish and the Burger King – stay tuned for Part 3 to find out more) discusses how he and his wife gambled on Customer Service in Las Vegas and won… big time. |
Customer Service. It’s a thing that many companies talk about and strive to achieve in the eyes of the common public. Many a CEO has often been heard around the gold-plated water coolers with his buddies saying: “Doesn’t Joe Lunchpail know that we care? Doesn’t Mary J. Homemaker realize how important she is to us? It is a tragedy these common folk lack the intellect to see how we are hear to guide them… say good fellow is that a canapé?”
Sometimes it must seem to those in the customer service industry the “Satisfied Customer” is a mythical creature like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and the Honest Politician.
There are precisely two times that we will pay a lot of attention to customer service. The first is when customer service is so bad it stands out – sadly this is far more often than the next: when people go out of their way and do there dangdest to make sure that the needs of me, Jon Q Customer, are met to the nth degree.
While in Las Vegas my wife and I had many service experiences. Restaurants. Stores. Airport. The thing that stood out to me is the fact that virtually all of these people – all the waiters, cabbies, airline attendants, shopping clerks - all possessed two traits that I look for in people in those positions – first and of the utmost importance: competence. Following right behind that: manners.
There’s something about going into a restaurant here in Canada where you feel obligated to tip. The service could be horrible, the food could be garbage, yet most of us might still feel inclined to drop the gratuity bomb. I once got hung up in a Red Robin for 45 minutes trying to find a server to bring us our bill while they chased after a dine and dash (almost creating the second of the evening). The food had been horrible and the waiter had been a doofus. I didn’t tip.
I still feel guilty.
What if I deprived his kids of food? Although in hindsight, if his kids did have food they’d be waiting so long for that jackass to bring it that it would be long cold by the time they got it… but I digress. In Canada, people who work in service industries are working there until they can find something better – and they work like that. You do enough to do the job and you complain about the goofs that come in (I don’t have a problem with complaining about the goofs though – its part of the pay package for people who have to put up with goofs for a living).
In virtually every restaurant and every store we went in to, the people we interacted with were great at their jobs and seemed happy to be there. In virtually every clothing store we went shopped, we told them how the airline had lost our luggage, and in many cases the clerks went and found coupons, some of them out of date, or made up some discounts and gave us from 15-25% off.
You can’t teach that sort of customer service. You can try to teach that sort of customer service but you just get a bunch of disgruntled employees sitting in a room listening to an instructor that hasn’t served anyone since she got her degree in College.
Kudos to the chick at Westjet who almost managed to take the sting out of us losing our luggage. Kudos again to Westjet for ponying up for their mistake (though it would have been nice if they’d given us a plane). Kudos to Vanessa at the IHOP, kudos to the gals of Target, kudos to the chick at Lane Bryant who helped my wife so much (who’s name I can’t remember because I wasn’t shopping there for me) and then gave us the discount that had expired a month ago.
I gotta tell you I feel odd not complaining about it though… happily I came back to the Bread Garden near work… plenty of fodder for complaint.
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