The Death Of Customer Service: The Idiots Rule

The Death Of Customer Service: The Idiots Rule

By

Leonard Zwelling

Maybe this has happened to you.

I have an HVAC service company with which I have been dealing for over forty years. When we first began using them, they were a small local company. I knew the owner personally. Their service was exemplary.

As with so any good, small companies, it was bought by a larger corporate entity. Probably more than once. We stuck with them despite having bumps along the road with the quality of the maintenance service and the degree of expertise and promptness of their technicians. Both were highly variable. Nonetheless, the company did service the air conditioning when it went out during the summer, even after their technician had checked it a month before.

Here’s the problem. The company gives you a four-hour window during which their technician will arrive to perform the maintenance. In the past, it was more than likely that the technician would call in the early part of that window. No longer. It is almost always at the very last minute that the tech shows up and then only after I call the office multiple times. The check-up usually takes about two hours. The technicians are still very professional, but I seem to be being billed larger and larger amounts for parts with each visit. It’s never just a check-up. It’s always major surgery.

Under this system, I am stuck in the house for six hours twice a year waiting for these guys. I called other companies. They use the same model—four-hour windows; goodness knows when they will show up.

The HVAC people do not care about your time, only their money, which they usually already have so they have no impetus to improve their service or hire more technicians, if they can even find them.

Oh yes, and I tried to talk to a supervisor. There was no one in the office. They all take lunch together.

We also have a water delivery service that brings large, heavy bottles of water to the house every few weeks for use in a dispenser the company rents to us. The water is great. The service not so much and now getting worse as our original delivery service has been bought by a bigger company. Do I detect a theme here?

Today’s delivery was deposited on our front step though I have asked the company to have the delivery man ring the bell so I do not have to lug the fifty-pound jugs into the house. They never call first. They never ring.

Today’s bottles came from Ozarka, not Sparkletts, our regular company. To get the water attached to the dispenser one must poke a probe through a plastic membrane atop the bottle. That was easy with the Sparkletts bottles. The Ozarka tops are much thicker. I suspect the Ozarka dispensers are different than ours. The hose that goes into the bottle easily with the Sparkletts bottles had to be forced into the Ozarka bottle.

I called the delivery company named Primo. They did know that the bottles in our area had changed, but had no idea that there might be a problem using the machines rented by Sparkletts with Ozarka bottles. Furthermore, I seriously doubt the person with whom I spoke cared. The woman said someone would get back to me. We all know that never happens.

Later that day I got through to someone with a modicum of intelligence. She told me that I was supposed to receive Sparkletts bottles. In other words, the delivery man erred. I will have to wait another week until he can return to pick up the unusable Ozarka bottles and replace them with Sparkletts bottles. In the meantime, I gerry rigged one of the Ozarka bottles to function.

When I was the Vice President for Research Administration our watchwords were “service with a sense of urgency.” Our only jobs were to make the performance of federally-regulated research as easy as possible for the faculty, to facilitate the front-end of the grants submission process, and to educate, educate, educate everyone on the research teams in research compliance and the protocol and grants approval processes. I also felt it was absolutely incumbent upon me to be available 24/7 for the faculty and for those to whom I reported in these matters. I was in the office by 7:30 and usually left at 6. I believed then and believe now that faculty must have access to all vice presidents face-to-face when the faculty member has a problem.

I once spent an entire Saturday getting an animal drug (ivermectin) cleared by the FDA for human use in a transplant patient with systemic strongyloides. That was my job. I just wish that the people with whom I have to deal most days took their service jobs as seriously as I took mine. I fear those days are gone.

Vice presidents (and presidents) are working from home. They cannot. Here’s why.

The late, great Rabbi Sam Karff taught me a long time ago that he is often interrupted in what he is doing, but “the interruptions are my work.” Exactly.

People have to feel that you are there for them when they need you.  You cannot be there for them and be at home. This work from home garbage has reached its limits of utility. Everyone, back to the office and re-establish your human relationships and the concept of servicing your colleagues. I am sorry. You can’t do that from home.

And you, doctor, put on a tie! I am tired of seeing the world in Lululemon and my doctors in scrubs. One thing you have to say for Trump.  His ties may be too long but at least he wears one.