Talk About Bad Service.

As a sales assistant, it is my job to give excellent customer service constantly at work. My mood should not affect my service or how I treat my customers, and I never let it. If I’m having a bad day or a hard time, I never let it show around customers. My easy happiness is hard to fake, but I learnt quite early on in my retail career how to be one thing for a customer and another for myself.

I’ve perfected the over the top ‘Disney’ smile, aka the exaggerated happiness which I was told all Disney employees are taught to have. I am even able to get out my typical ‘passion for fashion’ with customers when I’m having a bad time, because if the customer has a good experience they are more likely to return and that’s what all sales assistant wants.

Like everyone I have experienced good and bad customer service and I try to use these as examples for myself as to what to do and what not to do. I want to talk about some bad customer service which I received just last week and ultimately put in a complaint about the member of staff because of it. I won’t name the company or the employee (although they were not wearing a name tag so I couldn’t do so anyway), however for the purpose of story-telling I shall call the employee ‘Ashley’. (It’s hard to tell this story without some details, so I shall try to do with as few identifying details as possible.)

I bought my laptop from this store a little over a year ago and have being having a few problems with it. Nothing major, but I thought, since I had paid for insurance on the thing, I’d take it in for a free check. Now, since it was Easter Weekend it was pretty busy and the queue to have items checked over was a little longer than usual. I waited, patiently and after about ten minutes, an employee walked over to ask if I needed help. I explained my situation and ASHLEY said to bring it to the counter to be looked at.

I started up my laptop, explained my issue again and Ashley started running through some typical solutions, all of which I had already tried. In this aspect, Ashley was helpful to try these things and a ultimately a few I hadn’t thought about trying. However, after starting up the check, Ashley then walked off to help another member of staff with another customer.

I want to note that I have no problem with Ashley helping another customer, since there wasn’t much that could be done while we waited for the check to finish, however Ashley didn’t offer an apology or ask if I minded being left. Had it being me, this is how it would have gone down:

Staff: This clean up may take a few minutes, would you mind if I just helped this customer while we wait?

Customer: (has really no other choice, but some would say no) Go ahead.

Staff: Thank you, it won’t take too long.

-when staff returns-

Staff: Sorry about that, thank you for waiting…

Basic customer service skills, surely? Unfortunately Ashley didn’t ask, didn’t apologise or offer any consolation for leaving me standing around like an idiot while other customers were helped. This happened on multiple occasions during a few checks and not once was I offered any apology. There was even a few moments when Ashley stayed with me while we waited and I tried to make some sort of conversation, something I would do if the role was reversed, but Ashley didn’t attempt to acknowledge me. I was utterly offended by the lack of customer service or even just good manners offered.

Regardless, when it was decided nothing more could be done, I thanks Ashley for the help and asked if there was something external I could buy to help the laptop. Ashley gave a suggestion and when I asked where about in the store I could find this item, I was POINTED in the direction.

That is basically my rant over. I was upset after this experience, especially as someone who prides myself on good customer service. Would I recommend this store to someone? I would, yes, because it is a good store and I have always had good customer service from their staff every  time I have visited and have even received supposedly ‘special’ discounts as a frequent customer by some of the members of staff. It was on this one occasion with ‘Ashley’ which was a bad experience.

If you work in customer services, I’m sure most know how to deliver excellent customer service, but just remember you need to treat the customers as you’d want to be treated.

As a side note, as a customer, act in a way in which you’d like customers to treat you too.

Thanks for reading!