By Kevin Rackham
Young Voices writer | Posted: Thursday, November 13, 2008 12:00 am
The other day as I was sitting in the drive-through at a fast food restaurant, I was thinking about telemarketers.
Recently, I had received a number of recorded calls from a company I had never heard of.
The voice gave me an option to press a button if this was the wrong number. I did so every time.
Finally, I received a call from an actual person. I told him that this was the wrong number and explained the situation and asked him to take me off their calling list.
He proceeded to ask in an incredulous, condescending tone: "Do you really think we would keep calling if we knew it was a wrong number?" Then, he hung up. It infuriated me.
I had plenty of time to think about telemarketers. We ended up having to wait in that drive-through for 20 minutes. I don't know why it took so long (there were only two cars in front of us), but by that time it would've been faster to have gone home and eaten. The restaurant's employees were of course "sorry about the wait," but that didn't change anything.
These stories have one major thing in common: bad customer service. Most people have a general idea of what good customer service is. It is treating customers with courtesy, attending to them promptly, listening to them and helping them find what they want and need. It is, to use the cliché, putting the customer first.
But some businesses seem to have lost the hang of that. There are the clerks at any number of stores who talk over you while you try to tell them what you're looking for. Sometimes this is forgivable. The employee may be overenthusiastic about his job. But for the most part, it's frustrating and makes customers want to take their money somewhere else.
Even worse is getting the wrong purchase. A restaurant in Corvallis has given my grandma and me the wrong order four times out of the last five we've eaten there. That's just careless. It was understandable the first time, but by the third I began to wonder how the place still managed to function. By the fourth I decided not to eat there anymore. Just like that, they lost a customer and I highly doubt I'm the only one.
Businesses rely on people telling their friends and family about what a great place they are to shop or eat. But that works the other way around, too. When someone gets treated poorly at your store, you bet they're going to tell everyone they know about it, because they're mad. If I were in charge, I'd be making sure that the customers who came were being treated as carefully as possible.
That's not all. Why should people have to keep buying from a place with bad service when they can get the exact same product online? They don't have to deal with anyone besides an occasional e-mail, which makes it all that much easier.
If you ask me, all business is going to be done on the Internet not too far in the future anyway. It's a common trend in everything else.
The newspapers are withering because so many people are getting their news online. The record companies are losing a lot money to iTunes and other music sites.
The important thing for stores now to is to make the change to Internet business as quickly and successfully as possible, and if they can't make the change, to prolong themselves for as long as possible.
And if their customer service doesn't shape up, prolonging themselves is exactly what they aren't going to do.
Kevin Rackham is a sophomore at South Albany High School.