Readers have lined up to agree with Kevin Naughton’s winding tale of terrible retail service (Poor service: the real reason we shop online) – and offering some of their own experiences, including from the other side of the counter.
BRONWYN LUDLAM: I know where you are coming from (or perhaps that should be what you’re running from!) Kevin Naughton. I am regularly bemused, flummoxed and sometimes even downright disgusted at the lack of service of so many bricks and mortar businesses. The differentiator between online and in-person shopping is the human face – surely those optimistically named “service staff” should be chosen carefully, receive ongoing training and when they’ve proved themselves, the opportunity to train others.
I try to buy locally but find that retail staff often don’t know their products, and more particularly, aren’t willing to find out information, source items, and particularly, KEEP IN TOUCH. Communications skills are in short supply or perhaps aren’t highly valued – yet these are what will make customers return. As for purveyors of services – my recent exchanges in relation to lift repairs and the installation of aluminium/glass doors and windows can only be described as frustrating. Unreturned calls, unacknowledged monetary deposits for upcoming work, lack of communication between head office and technicians, and a general overall casualness towards the customer, make me unsurprised that so many street-front businesses are losing out.
PETER LLEWELLYN: I would like to share a similar “poor service” story to Kevin Naughton’s, although we didn’t have the option of turning to online shopping. Our trusty fridge recently went on the blink so we rang the authorised service provider for our area. The technician duly arrived and found that the thermostat needed replacing.
He would order one and come back in a couple of days – which he did. He then noticed that the door seal was broken. “If I’d noticed that before” he said, “I wouldn’t have ordered the thermostat. It will just make the fridge freeze.” So we said: “Well how about replacing the door seal while you’re at it.”
“Can’t be done. If I take the door lining off to replace the seal I won’t be able to get it back on properly because it will warp and the door won’t shut. You need a new fridge. Are you sure you want me to put the thermostat in, because it’s just a waste of time?”
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This sounded a bit odd, so we said: “Put the thermostat in” and, very reluctantly, he did. And we rang a company that advertised the replacement of fridge seals and had a new door seal fitted (with another call-out fee of course).
But, as predicted, the fridge froze, even when we turned the thermostat back as far as it would go. So we rang the service centre and the same technician came back. His opening remark to my wife was: “I told that guy the fridge would freeze because the seal’s broken”. To which she replied: “But we’ve had the seal replaced”.
Faced with this, the technician adjusted the thermostat so the fridge no longer froze, and it’s been fine ever since.
And we can’t help wondering if he purposely set the thermostat so it would freeze everything, just to prove a point. Or maybe he gets a commission when he sells a new fridge?
VERONICA PHILLIPS: My issue is the time consumed waiting for service, to the extent that I feel that I should charge them for my precious time and costs for chasing up on poor service and dodgy goods. This should also include builders that proudly state that they are the backbone to the state’s economy.
After having built my house through a major building firm, I am now having to rip up my driveway and concrete paving I paid for them to lay around my house because the concreters neglected to include a guard against slab edge dampness. To add more to this that the slab had too much water added when it was poured which has caused he entrances to the double garage to crumble. Then there is the front door that has bowed and the internal garage door that has also bowed. To fix the slab edge dampness issue I’ll have to refinance my home to get some money to have this redone.
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Talk about poor service and not complying with the contract I signed with them. The company won’t do anything to fix the problems unless I take them to court which again I can’t afford. There is a culture in business in this state to rip people off to make money.
ANDREW VINCENT: I applaud the courage and candour of your correspondent criticising the “service” levels of many Adelaide businesses.
One gets the distinct impression that many Adelaide retail and service businesses are run for the gratification of the owners rather than to provide good service or products to the public.
One bug bear of mine: standing in a queue waiting to pay for something in a shop, one is often detained for the duration of the chit-chat in which the clerk and the customer being served engages. The customer must share the blame in this perverse extension of “making nice” but surely the clerk must find a way to end the engagement and serve the next customer!
While standing, waiting, waiting, listening to these conversations, as if we were in a country town general store between the wars rather than a busy capital city shop, one’s memory is drawn towards the immortal words of a past tennis pro: “you can not be serious!”.
TRISTA COULTER: As a former retail worker I read your article with great interest but I was annoyed to see that the author had not considered what customer service is like from the retail perspective. I am not by any means saying that there aren’t shops who give notoriously poor service – I have experienced my fair share of unhelpful sales people and clueless clerks. I would however like to point out that retail can often be a stressful, even potentially violent job and those experiences can have an impact on the quality of service retail workers deliver.
I worked as a customer service assistant for over four years and during that time I and my co workers were spat at, verbally and in one instance physically assaulted and were victimised by threats and racial taunts – over issues as trivial as the prices of cigarettes or the availability of stock! The sad thing is that most of the offending people were clearly old enough to know better. Most people would raise the roof if they saw their own children and family members being treated this way – so why is it acceptable to behave this way towards strangers? Retail workers, like everyone, are just trying to earn an honest living and they deserve to be treated with respect and dignity – after all, you expect nothing less for yourself right? And I can tell you from personal experience that when you work eight hours a day and spend most of that day dealing with shouting, rude customers who call you every name under the sun, it can be a little difficult to smile and maintain the enthusiasm customers seem to expect. Having said that, I know (again from experience) that not all people are rude and prone to tantrums and in reality most of my customers were lovely people – but there were many that were not.
I’d also like to point out that, in cases such as the irreparable vacuum cleaner the clerks are usually just the middle men – grunts that are forced to answer to the higher power, be it management or third party stores such as the repairer mentioned in the story. In most cases we have no control over pricing, stock availability and the many other various issues that feature heavily in customer complaints, yet we are always the ones to bear the full force of irate customers who seem to be under the impression that we are personally targeting them – as if we have that much spare time in our days. And trust me, I’ve had more than a few customers that I wished WOULD shop online to spare me the headache of having to deal with their constant tantrums and disrespectful attitudes.
So please, next time you visit a shop and receive what you feel to be ‘poor service’, remind yourself about this letter and smile at the worker, even ask how they’ve been. You may find their perceived lack of helpfulness is actually the result of a much deeper issue.
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