My partner and I have been involved in customer service for a combined 50 years. We find it more and more unbelievable some of the level of customer service we receive - both from large and small organizations. We decided to start gathering information from people who have experienced either good or bad customer service.
Soon I will share our experiences with some restaurants in Fort Lauderdale, a hotel and restaurants in Montreal and here in Toronto.
Have you bought a new computer that should be just hook up and running - oops then you start spending hours and hours on the phone with your internet provider?
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I share your interest in the quality of the service industry. Too often, people demand service only from the industries which are traditionally in the business of providing service (waiters, bank clerks, etc.). In my experience, however, the requirement for quality service encompasses a much broader scope, including professional services from lawyers, accountants, doctors, etc. Often, the front line for those "service" industries is the secretarial staff. As with so many famous British households, the staff often adopts the snobbish characteristics of the house owner, and becomes rather haughty with the paying clients or patients.
I may perhaps refer to this general condition as one of unmitigated arrogance, sometimes characteristic of those who secure a special job of prominence in a business as a result of their amorous relationship with the owner, but for no other professional reason. I am thinking here of those people who one often encounters on the reception desk of businesses, especially restaurants. These people are often lacking in common courtesies.
I realize these observations are of a very general nature only, but they unfortunately reflect what I feel is a pervasive malaise in Canadian business. I may be imagining things, but my experience in the United States is quite different, as I there find that the training of staff is of a much higher caliber, at least on the level where you wouldn't normally expect it (of course, in the more high end establishments, weather in Canada or the United States, one is usually in the company of professionals).
In the search for money, and all the hard work that goes into making it, both owners and employees often forget that it is the nature of the personal relationship which one has with the business that makes all the difference. I realize that the exigencies of running a business can at times be very difficult and demanding, but all that work is for naught if one fails to maintain a comfortable working relationship with one's partners in business. For example, a simple expression of Thank-you for your business! In the same vein, I remind my staff that a departing clients invariably look to the staff member for some form of approbation, a mere bit of eye contact, for example. If one thinks that these rules of conduct are complicated, one need only reflect upon the way each of us wishes to be treated when we engage the services of a business. I suspect that more often than not, our concern as a customer is more directed to being treated well than obtaining perfect service (consider, for example, the instance where a waiter makes a reasonable error in judgment, with an apology). Similarly, even in professional circumstances, where the standards of performance are often very high (to avoid resulting litigation), there is still room for the human element, by which I mean the ability to share some genuine care and concern for the person with whom one is dealing.
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