Whilst moving to the beautiful Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, we met some lovely individuals who really helped bring our tree change dreams to life.
And we met some right tossers.
It’s been a while since I had a good rant about lousy customer service, but having encountered a few examples of bad customer service of late, it’s time to air them.
We were in a tidy, well maintained café enjoying some reasonably nice food when a lady came in and asked the owner a question.
After a short conversation, the lady left with her takeaway coffee and the owner leant through the hatch and recounted what a loser this lady was. “She’s like, ‘Do you do dinner?’ and I’m like ‘No’ and she’s like ‘Why not? You could make a killing in this area.’ and I’m like ‘Well we don’t.’ Chu! Some people, I mean, she’s like…”
The linguistic inaccuracies were, like, enough to get my blood pressure up, but what really got my goat is this slagging off of a customer in front of other customers!
You just can’t. Be Basil Fawlty in the privacy of your home, but don’t ever let any customer hear you talk ill of another. It’s just wrong.
Next up was the shop with the invisible display case. After I nearly walked into it, the owner said “Sorry about that. I do that all the time!” Which absolutely, positively begs the question “Why don’t you move it then?”
This is a tad unfair as I’m sure all our businesses have obvious problems we know how to fix but don’t.
The final example of bad customer service was the nay saying estate agent who said “You’ll never find a rental home here, there are five applications to each property.” Well, we did find a place and guess who’s not going to get our business when we’re ready to buy?
I am going to have a lie down now but I can highly recommend sharing your customer service woes with a few thousand others. What’s riled you lately? Get it off your chest here.
“ It’s been a while since I had a good rant about lousy customer service, but having encountered a few examples of bad customer service of late, it’s time to air them. ”
Sam Leader is a director of Flying Solo and its editor. She is the co-author of Flying Solo - How to go it alone in business.
