I travel quite frequently and, for the most part, my hotel booking or rental car arrangements have usually gone off without a hitch. But when I do encounter the odd snafu, I ensure that I do not sit idly by and say nothing.Having grown up in a culture of business, I know what to expect both as a customer and as a provider of services, since I can see the action from opposite sides.So when I do encounter bad service I am quick to react to it–that's the only way we can get better.
For instance, when I found my check-in experience at Hertz Car rental was less than acceptable, I wrote the management and they promptly replied acknowledging my discomfort and offered me a full refund–as they did when I returned a car with a faulty accelerator pedal. I declined those generous offers, since all I wanted was an apology.At a recent stay in a California hotel, there were some ants on the bathroom counter and the toilet was giving trouble–I reported it to the front desk but they were slow to act.
What did I then do? I wrote management and was offered profuse apologies and free nights to compensate. Once more, I refused since it was the principle of the matter, not the recompense that I was after.Even my US cellphone provider, having charged my credit card multiple times for the same transaction, acknowledged their mistake and added one year's worth of minutes for free to make up for my displeasure.
Having seen how my dealings with customer service were supposed to be handled, my daughter, having had a most unpleasant experience at a top named spa in Trinidad, decided to write the management to voice her concerns after her visit. Unlike me she is usually quite tolerant but this incident upset her greatly.
How differently the locals reacted to her letter of complaint. She was, though in veiled language, called a liar as they stood by their employees' words, despite the fact that my daughter's friend, who accompanied her on the spa visit, and had almost the exact same problem, could attest to the veracity of her claims. What a difference.
I hastened to comfort my crestfallen daughter and advised that she had an unfair expectation of what would have happened with customer service in Trinidad–over here we practice customer no-service.Moral of the story: no visions of 2020 excellence, no amount of patting ourselves on the shoulder and saying we are world-class, no harping on our perceived sense of self-importance of what we bring to the world, will ever take us out of the mire that we, as a people, find ourselves in. We need to fix the basic things first.
Business people (and here I am speaking as a businessman myself) need to understand that we pay their salaries and afford them their lifestyles, and consumers need to recognise that they have the power in their pockets.When we continue to accept bad service, yet continue to pay for it, we spoil it for others. I, for one, will never ever accept less than excellence where I am spending my money and a contracted service is involved.
H T Amin
Woodbrook