Yesterday morning I had breakfast with my mom, who formerly worked at a “big box” store and a hotel, and currently works in a different hotel. She was telling me stories about past and current coworkers, and some of the things they’ve done that are just ridiculous and make me wonder how they have a job. One person she worked with refused to take pool towels out of the garbage because it wasn’t his job.
If guests mistook the garbage for the used towel bin, so be it. Over 150 pool towels were lost in four months because of this. How would you feel if your employee knowingly threw out business property because taking 4 seconds to retrieve it from the trash wasn’t his job? We ARE talking about a grown adult, are we not? And would you return to a hotel who never had enough pool towels?
I would never refuse to do something for a boss or client because “it isn’t my job.” If I don’t have the answer, I’ll refer them to someone who does. If I don’t know how to do it, I’ll ask. If it isn’t a service I/we offer, I’ll refer them to a service that does offer it or explain how to find one. But if someone emailed me and wanted to know how to get their children’s book published, I’d never say, “I don’t know, I don’t do children’s books. That’s not my job.” I’d at least throw them a few links to get started.
KFC has been in Medford for some time now. They recently opened after six months of remodeling to become a KFC/Taco Bell. The first few weeks have been insane. On a handful of crazy occasions, I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing human nature at it’s finest, which I say as sarcasm drips out of my mouth. The night they opened I waited an hour and three minutes for my food. Two days later I waited 47 minutes, and only got it because I went up after they skipped my number. The stories about their service roll in. One friend witnessed an elderly woman ask about her skipped number after waiting for half an hour, and the teenager behind the counter replied, “Uh, I don’t know.” He didn’t go check, he didn’t so much as turn around and pretend to look at a screen. He said, “Uh, I don’t know,” and stared at the woman until she turned around and started to walk away. The shift manager caught it and took care of it, thankfully, but tell me something. With no less than sixteen people behind the counter at all times during opening week, do you truly expect to have a job in three months when the madness calms down? Who will be first to go, the person who tries or the who just doesn’t know? How shiny do you think that reference will be to future employers?
A friend of mine is moving. She called the local grocery store at 7am looking for boxes. They told her to call back at 11. She did. They told her the boxes were gone, that someone else had picked them up. She did everything right, and the reply was still, “Well, if you call, and someone else comes and picks up the boxes before you call back, that’s too bad, I can’t help that.” Such interactions make it really easy to decide where I should and shouldn’t shop.
I was shopping for a new health insurance policy. I called a local insurance agency and went online. Four months later the agent called me back, demanding to know if I was going to sign the papers or not. I told her she never sent me any papers, and she huffed, “Well, you never called back!”
Ah.
“Customer service” minus “service” doesn’t equal “customers.”
