Preventing Customer Service Nightmares

By Mark Fulton

The story you’re about to read is true. The location of the incident has been withheld to protect the innocent — namely, me.

I was running errands on a sunny Friday afternoon when I stopped by the local post office to buy some stamps. No one else in the place. Just me and the two postal workers behind the counter. I walked up to the first window and asked for a roll of stamps. The man said, “I’m closed. Step to the next window.” Which I did.

The woman at the next window looked at me. “Roll of stamps, please,” I said.

She opened her drawer, looked up and said, “I don’t have any rolls. How ’bout a sheet?”

“I need a roll,” I explained. “There’s no room in my desk drawer for a sheet. A sheet would cover everything else up. That’s why I get rolls ...” My voice trailed off as I discerned in her expression utter disinterest in my workspace challenges.

Just then, her co-worker spoke up. “I have rolls,” he said. He handed her a roll of stamps and went back to doing whatever postal workers do when their window is closed.

I presented my credit card to the woman.

“Credit card,” she said, regarding my proffered plastic as though I were trying to hand her a leech. That’s when the really bizarre part of this transaction began.

As the woman processed my credit card, she began talking to her co-worker in the first window. She said that she had been to a fast food restaurant recently and had received really lousy service. She had to wait 15 minutes before anybody even paid any attention to her. Well, this was totally unacceptable, so she demanded to see the manager. Allegedly, it took another 15 minutes before the manager came out to speak to her. “What kind of customer service was that?” she asked her co-worker.

As a postal customer who had been waiting for more than a few minutes to complete a stamp purchase, I was identifying with her complaint — especially since she was totally ignoring me while she related her tale of indignation.

She continued her story for her co-worker as she pushed my credit card slip toward me to sign. “I said I was never coming back to that place,” she recounted. “I said, ‘You don’t know how to treat customers with respect. You need to train your people better.’ That’s what I said,” she said.

As I folded my credit card receipt and prepared to walk away from the window, I hesitated. My expectation that I might get a “thank you” for my stamp purchase quickly faded when I heard the woman say, “Well, I decided to go back there the next day and see if anything had changed. Let me tell you what happened then!”

Despite my intense interest in how the postal worker’s saga of rotten customer service turned out, I left. I had an idea that I already knew the outcome.

Providing excellent customer service is serious business for every business. There are lots of rules that can be addressed on this subject, but one seems to stand out as both obvious and obligatory: DON’T IGNORE THE CUSTOMER!

There is nothing more irritating to me than being treated like “The Invisible Patron.” Surprisingly, it happens fairly regularly, and that’s bad news for businesses that are competing for consumer dollars.

Clerks and cashiers constitute the front line of customer interaction. Consequently, for the few minutes that transpire during a transaction, the customer ought to be the center of that employee’s universe.

Here are my cardinal rules for treating customers like people:

1. Look at the customer. Eye contact is the foundation of nonverbal communication. You haven’t acknowledged a person’s existence until you’ve looked him or her in the eye.
   
   
2. Be pleasant. A nice smile goes a long way toward making a customer feel welcome and appreciated.
   
   
3. Speak to the customer. This exchange needs to go beyond, “Hi, how ya doin’?” Try asking customers if they found everything they were looking for. Or improvise and offer a pleasantry that engages the customer in a brief conversation about the weather or something else of light importance.
   
   
4. Don’t talk to co-workers. This may seem harsh, but what your friend did last night is secondary to keeping your focus on the person in front of you. Wait until you have no customers in order to catch up on the latest dirt.
   
   
5. Invite the customer to come back. This may seem superfluous, but asking the customer to come back really does plant a positive impression in his or her mind. Done well, the invitation to return can set the stage for future transactions and leave the customer with a pleasing feeling of acceptance and value.

It is not my intention to disparage the postal service with the preceding tale. Really. I know better than to upset those folks.

Instead, I hope that relating my experience might challenge everyone in business to pay closer attention to this vital point of interaction. If you don’t, “The Invisible Patron” will become someone else’s customer.

Copyright 1999 © Mark S. Fulton