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A MONTHLY COLUMN OF |
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by Robert Cooper |
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2006 Student of the Year |
I am going to date myself, but I want to tell you that I was a boy and teenager in the 1960s and 70s. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about customer service in America and how it has changed from those years until now. I am presently most conscious of the skills of chiropractic interns and support staff in dealing with patients in the TCC clinic, but I want to make a point about a societal change largely caused by, as I see it, a business change – the way Americans shop.
Recently, I stopped at a local supermarket to buy eggs and milk. I was in the express line behind several people, and I decided to discretely study the technique of the young lady checking out everyone before me. She never greeted, thanked, or even made eye contact with any customer. As she dragged groceries across the scanner (without making eye contact with those either), she engaged in a personal phone call on her headset and then complained to the checker behind her about an overdue break. The one and only time she looked my way was when I was at the back of the line and she called out, “Sir, I’m closing! You’re the back of the line! You need to tell people behind you.”
I “need” to tell people behind me? I was quietly annoyed, but I did it anyway … if only to demonstrate that I could do it with more tact than she. When I finally got to hand her my money and take my plastic (I wanted paper) bag to leave, I said “thank you” and her response was “Your change is down there.”
“Down where?” I asked. She wasn’t pointing or looking at the floor. In fact, she wasn’t even there, having fled for her overdue break. “There,” said the young man who had sacked my eggs and milk. He pointed at the change slot at the end of the checkout stand before fleeing the scene himself. It was two cents. I considered leaving it there as a sarcastic tip, but my point would have been missed, and the next customer to pass through would not even notice and enjoy getting too much change.
Although in a complaining mood, I did not approach a manager to do so. For one thing, the young man who sacked my eggs and milk and had absently witnessed it all was wearing an “Assistant Manager” badge. For another, this example of customer service is pretty much the standard in 2007 in this and most other supermarkets I visit. I was a supermarket checker and stocker myself after school back in the 70s, and I shudder to think of the chewing out I would have gotten from the manager for ever displaying less than perfect customer service skills. Indeed, we had regular staff meetings on topics like personal hygiene, clear diction, and how to smile for eight hours without significant facial pain.
In the 60s, most of the stores my parents took me to were small and specialized. Many were family owned and operated, the customer service expert and friendly. The people who served you really knew their merchandise and cared that you were a happy and loyal customer. They took pride in their businesses and the way they projected themselves. I remember going to separate, small specialty stores to buy meat, bread, beverages, clothing, books, records (vinyl ones, not CDs), model cars, golf balls, and more. Some items, milk, eggs, even pretzels and potato chips, were delivered to our door by grinning men in white uniforms. The daily newspaper was delivered by a Beaver Cleaver look-a-like on a red bicycle, and we paid him at the front door. Now an adult arm hurls them from the driver’s window of a darkly-tinted Cadillac, and the bills appear in the mail.
In the late 60s, my town’s first enclosed shopping mall appeared, and life was never the same. Suddenly, national chain stores flooded in to compete with the scattered specialty stores. Sometime later (it seems like an instant but I guess it was years), large department stores including K-Mart, Target, and the all-powerful Wal-Mart took over the retail world. Today, sales clerks (or is “sales associates” the fashionable term?) evidently know little and care less about the merchandise under their football stadium-sized roofs. It certainly shows in the erosion of the commitment, merchandise expertise, and interpersonal skills and manners of store employees. I don’t completely fault these people. Given the service they’ve received themselves as customers in recent decades, they may well not know any better.
Do I have a point to make about chiropractic interns and support staff in 2007? Yes. If they are less than around 40 years old, they have been exposed to quality customer service as the exception and not the norm as I got to see it. My good role models were plentiful in my boyhood and teen years, and they made a lasting impression that serves me well to this day.
Shopping habits continue to change. More and more transactions take place on the internet where customer service is speed oriented and impersonal. It will be interesting to see over time how this movement away from doing business face to face will further erode interpersonal skills.
I suppose the good news for anyone in business is that if they go out of their way to learn and offer exceptional customer service, combining the high tech advantages of 2007 with the personal touches of the 1960s, this rarity will help them stand above their competition more than ever.
Now that I’m done writing this column, I’ll leave my office, stop at a self-serve gas station and pay at the pump. Then I’ll get cash at an ATM. At home, I’ll buy a medical book from amazon.com and an exercise poster from eBay. I’ll call a nephew to see how his internet college classes are going, but I’ll get his voicemail because he’s chatting with girls (he assumes) at myspace.com. I’ll later balance my checkbook via phone with the help of my robotic but ever-friendly “automated response teller.” What an alert yet soothing voice. Now, there is someone who understands good customer service.
NOTE: Robert’s “Chiropractic College Survival Guide” is now available in the TCC Bookstore.)
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