A Bit on Customer Service

Yesterday's Sea Ray conversation was pretty long, so I think I'll try and keep today's post a little bit shorter. One of the things that struck me today was the difference in attitude of customers. We get everybody from the super nice to vile dregs of society, and today it seemed like a see-saw battle from one type to the next. I had one old man stop me on my way to the back for lunch, I ended up letting someone else eat before me while I talked electronics but the poor guy felt really bad for interrupting my lunch. He turned out to be really nice and even apologetic. Luckily for him it's my job to put the customer first and I had no problem putting aside lunch for half an hour, especially to someone as kind as him. But not everyone is as nice as this man, the very second, no it was actually before I even finished with that man I had some lady demanding my attention and being quite rude about it as well. Unluckily for her I don't deal with assholes well and pawned her off on our least experienced associate. Customer service is great and all, but I think it should be a two way street, don't get pissed at me that there's 30 people in the store, only 5 associates, 4 of which are on the floor the other in the back. I'm sorry but we just can't be with everyone all the time. At times like this it's sort of a triage service, or worse yet, first come first serve.

It wasn't just this one case the whole day seemed to be like that, and the moment I step away from helping a customer to look up something, or to bring some of his stuff to the counter it's suddenly open season to grab me and try and make me give my undivided attention to someone else. Some even manage to get quite pissed that I was helping someone else. How would they like if their sales person just up and left them hanging for 20 minutes while they tried to sell stuff to someone else. We don't even get commission! To illustrate this here's a story from a little later in the day after most of my help had left. It was me and one other person in the store. I ended up having to spool a fishing reel for a gentleman that I had been helping for quite some time. In the middle of the process the customer stops me and points to a lady standing behind me. "Are you the only one in the store? I've been wandering around for 20 minutes saying hello!". Well that can't be right, I've only been down here doing this for 5 minutes, and where was my coworker? He was busy over in electronics with another customer, in plain view. I was quite ready to just blow the lady off for being rude, but luckily for her the customer my coworker was with heard her plea for assistance and let him go help her, my customer probably would have too, but there was no way she was going to let one of us go to help someone else once she had our attention, which she made quite clear a few minutes later.

I guess the point of this is that I just don't understand where some people come from. As a company and especially in the store I work at, customers come first, and customer service is the name of the game. Without them we'd be out of business and we really do bend over backward and then some to help most people. But the instant you become and asshole to me for doing the best I can and helping someone else that was there before you, I no longer care much about your experience and I'm much less likely to try my hardest to help you out. In fact I could be come a complete dick and pretty much make you never want to shop with my company again. I won't do that unless it's truly warranted which is extremely rare. But honestly the status quo of "Treat others as you would like to be treated" is obviously dead in an alarming number of people. If people would just think about that a little then maybe the service they demanded so intensely would be of a higher caliber, but that's just my 2 cents. And until you piss me off I'll do everything in my power to help you out as best as I can.