The One About Customer Service.

I continue to build up stamina post-surgery, but it’s hard to make headway when the heat sucks the stamina right back out of me. When I first got back from the hospital I was falling asleep every couple of hours, but now I seem to have that reduced to a mid-afternoon siesta. I can take some small consolation in the fact that the cats once again sleep far more than I do; by any measure that means improvement, I’d say.

Want to hear a really funny good news/bad news joke? The good news: my state’s unemployment rate dropped in April. The bad news: that means that my extended unemployment gets abruptly cut-off at the end of this week, along with every other person in my state who is on extended unemployment. Yeah, I’m laughing my head off.

I actually found that out by accident, listening to the canned messages while on-hold with the State Unemployment Office. My unemployment payments abruptly stopped the beginning of May, even though I was still sending correctly completed forms in every week. On my tier of unemployment, you need to send documentation that you’ve done job hunts at least twice a week on two separate days. It isn’t really a big deal, since it wasn’t anything I hadn’t already been doing anyhow. The most difficult portion of that for me was finding somebody who wanted to deal with me other than electronically; virtually all jobs are posted on the net and want you to apply on the net, but the State stipulated you had to use two different forms of job hunt (electronic, phone, in person, job fair, that sort of thing). I’d been taking care of the non-electronic part of the requirement by cold-calling local independent pharmacies and leaving a copy of my resume, but there just aren’t that many independent pharmacies left. While I apply for more than two jobs a week, finding a way to satisfy the requirement has become challenging.

As usual, I digress. While unemployment payments get erratic on this tier, they have always eventually come through for me within twenty days. It was getting closer to thirty days though, so I called the state unemployment office to see if there was a problem. I was incredibly fortunate – it only took me thirty minutes of on-hold until I got through. (I think my record is just short of two hours, but I’d have to go back and check.) The woman who assisted me was very polite and helpful. She found out right away that they’d put a hold on my payments, but it took her a bit of time to find out it was because of something to do with my bi-weekly job hunt. She asked if I’d been doing it, and I confirmed that not only had I but that I had completed the required section of the form documenting it, and that I had Adobe copies of all my submissions that had been mailed. She sounded surprisingly relieved to hear that. I’m guessing that not a lot of claimants keep copies. Anyhow, she said that she couldn’t find anything wrong, and put in a release for my payments (yay!). She did warn me to keep the copies I had though, just in case.

I checked my bank account on-line this morning and there, glistening like diamonds in the sun, were my three back-weeks of payments. That leaves me last week’s payment, which should come through next week, and this week’s payment, which should come through the week after that, and then finito complete-o. (Should anyone be wondering, “Finito Completo” is an alternative name for “Shit Creek”.)

I did have an interview yesterday for a part-time position as a pharmacy technician at Wegmans, which is an east-coast high-end grocery. It would be a great place to work, though I’m having a really hard time getting excited over the part-time aspect. Regardless of my need for full time employment and of the fact that I’m technically not allowed to drive yet, I hithered me over to Wegman’s for my appointed rendezvous, only to find that what I thought was going to be a one-on-one with the store’s hiring manager was actually a sort of bastardized job fair. There is an upstairs cafe section in the store, part of which had been cordoned off, with rows of chairs set up within. At the entrance to the partitioned area was Check Point Charlie, where you signed in for the right to sit in the partitioned area. Fortunately the kid with the red pen was willing to flag me though.

Sitting in the roped off section made me feel a little bit like I had gotten onto the wrong bus. I might have been waiting for the 179 to Center City, but I’d somehow ended up on the local high school bus instead. It dawned on me at this point that these were all local kids looking for summer employment. Now I’d checked the store’s position listings, and I knew that they did have a part-time opening for a pharmacy tech listed, but I wasn’t precisely sure how I’d ended up here. Still, my name was on the list ….

When my name was called I entered a large meeting room immediately adjacent to what I’d now come to think of as the Bus Terminal Waiting Area. I was seated across the table from a nice, clean-cut kid whose B.A. diploma’s ink probably hadn’t completely dried yet. Reading from a script, he did the generic “Why did I want to work for Wegmans” questions. My answers were as mediocre as the questions. I have and will continue to lower myself, but I absolutely am incapable of delivering an impassioned speech on how it has been my life-long ambition to work in a grocery store. As he progressed, my brain loosened up a bit, and for some reason I started to deliver little doctoral theses to each of the questions.

What do you think “exceptional customer service” means?
Exceptional customer service is meeting and surpassing the customer’s expectations. In the customer’s eyes, courtesy, competence and efficiency are expected, not bonuses, and are never exceptional. To be exceptional you need to take these further and to add value to them. Courtesy can’t be memorized lines repeated to each customer like the script from a Tennessee Williams play. Competence must become more than consistently doing things correctly. It has to be done as though you are there for that customer and that customer alone. Efficiency means more than being quick. It means you need to anticipate what may happen and what could happen, and have a plan for reacting based on all contingencies.

At this point, College-boy had long since stopped writing (he hadn’t been given much space to record his impressions in). He took a deep breath and hit me with another.

What do you think customer service has to do with a company’s reputation?
Can we say “what a gimmee,” boys and girls?
Customer service doesn’t “have to do” with a company’s reputation, it IS the company’s reputation. It doesn’t matter what ads the store buys, what public service events it hosts or attends, or what it donates to local charities. Every single thing a company does to enhance its reputation can be completely unraveled by a single employee failing to completely please a customer. It isn’t a matter of right or wrong; it’s a matter of appearances. In these days of social media, a single complaint spreads as fast as the speed of light, and a single employee mistake can undo years of corporate PR.

At this point, College-boy is smiling, and he’s looking at me like I’m a ten-dollar bill he just found laying unsupervised on the sidewalk. Apparently, if they’re interested, I can expect to hear within two weeks for a follow-up interview.

Ironically, another grocery store, located a mere mile from the one I interviewed at, had its representatives send me a letter declining any liability for the damage to my car by their cart. I do not believe I shall mention this to The Prof until he asks. I also do not believe that there is a snowball’s chance in Hades that I shall ever use any store in their chain. How’s THAT for customer service?