One of my bigger gripes lately has been the service industry’s lack of actual service. By itself, I guess the lack of service is about what you’d expect, since companies have gotten so large that you’re generally dealing with some anonymous “customer service” representative, and most of them don’t have any real stake in the business.
But the trend that’s disturbing me most lately is the utter disregard that “service” companies have for my time. Rather than do things right the first time, they seem to routinely do things the quickest and shoddiest way, which means that at some point I’ll have to spend a couple hours making things right later.
Here are some recent examples from the past week or two:
- When I called Qwest to change my phone service, I spoke with the guy taking the order, and told him I had a Cisco 675 DSL router. He said I didn’t need any new hardware and everything would go smoothly. Of course I did need new hardware, but it took over three hours on the phone talking to various customer support people to figure that out, plus an hour or so talking to my ISP. All it would have taken was an extra minute or two on the part of the initial person to save me those three hours.
- I was planning to order some carpeting from Home Depot. Everything seemed set, and the guys came out to measure the room. When I went in to pay for the carpeting and the work, the guy screwed up the order, not putting on the extra underlayment needed on top of the vinyl tile I’ve got to deal with. I paid the bill, came home, and then got a call telling me I needed to come back and pay more. Well, I’d already spent a couple hours in the store talking carpeting with people. Having to go back to give them more money was just too much. I cancelled the order and got my money back. To heck with ’em.
- On a much smaller scale, when I ate breakfast at the Parkview Cafe yesterday morning, I was faced with a slow restaurant and a bored waitress. That’s understandable, but after I’d finished eating, and the busboy had come and cleared the table, the waitress still hadn’t made a move to come and give me my check. I had to get up and walk to the cash register. Not really a huge thing, but again, it’s the kind of thing that took some of my time and I probably won’t return there. They had a chance of getting a new customer, and they blew it.
The common theme here seems to be that these companies’ time is much more valuable than mine is. They’re certainly allowed to think that, but it sure doesn’t encourage me to be a faithful customer. If there were any alternative to Qwest for local phone service (including DSL), I’d be using it now (though sadly, all the phone companies seem to suck – it’s just a question of who sucks least). I’m going to be avoiding the Home Depot for the forseeable future. As for the Parkview Cafe, I probably won’t be back there, either.
On the other hand, there’s Best Buy. I bought a DirecTiVo there on the 21st, and it was supposed to be in last Friday. When I stopped in at the store to pick it up, I had to wait almost an hour to find out that they couldn’t find it in the store. But that didn’t really bother me at all. I think the difference is that I don’t really expect service from Best Buy, whereas the others were all places I was going to in an attempt to save me some time. I just went back on Saturday and picked up the unit, and was happily surprised to find that they actually had it. It’s all a matter of expectations, I guess.