Living in the country, our local post shop cum corner store is something of a centre of commerce. It’s not open many hours a day, but it’s a haven for checking ones mail (obviously) buying some emergency groceries or catching up on local news. This last aspect, the one that customers don’t actually buy, is possibly the most important and has had me thinking recently. William and Sarah who until recently ran the shop, always had time for a yarn or to catch up on local news. True, William has a tendency to get sidetracked and from time to time other peoples’ mail would end up in our mailbox, but this is simply an opportunity to pop inside and have a good catch up.
Our Post Shop is a perfect example of traditional customer service where the shopkeeper knows the customers individually, and has time to show an interest in what they’re up to. I’ve been thinking about customer service lately since I recently purchased a new vehicle. As an aside, and before anyone thinks I succumbed to a mid-life crisis and bought some European sports car, this is the first vehicle I have ever owned from brand new and it is also the cheapest EV I could find. No mid-life crisis for me (at least not one which results in sportscar buying antics).
Not being a car yard sort of a bloke, I entered into the transaction with some trepidation, My experience was interesting to say the least. The car yard I purchased from is more used to seeing individuals with those aforementioned midlife crises. Alongside the cheap EV that I was buying, they sell some very expensive European luxury vehicles which, to my eye at least, reeked of dead dinosaurs, expensive leather and bad aftershave. Anyway, I digress.
Walking into the car yard and heading over to the showroom EV I was looking at I waited for someone to come and serve me. I naively thought it wouldn’t take long as there were plenty of salespeople (actually, all of them salesmen and the likely source of that bad aftershave) not doing much. I had made the mistake, however, of not considering my wardrobe when heading to the yard. Bedecked, as I was, in my usual get up of Cactus shorts and a Cactus flannel shirt, the salesmen obviously took me as coming from the other side of the tracks and seemingly not worth any great haste when it came to customer service. I actually had to actively ask someone for some service and, while friendly, there was the unmistakable hint of a superior sneer.
I tend not to frequent many retail outlets, and the ones I do seem to be relaxed and non-judgmental about a guy turning up in crocs (or perhaps gumboots in winter) and some decade-old clothes. They don’t seem to judge the patron by their couture but instead see everyone as a customer to be treated with respect. Not so the automotive industry, it seems.
When the realization dawned that I was actually a serious purchaser, things tended upwards. The sales patter, while anything but authentic, was friendly (in a way that reminded me of the old English retail comedy, Are You Being Served). Fake friendliness and a hint of sneering superiority included.
After sales service was, as you would expect, a showcase example of how modern service looks and how much we’ve lost in our efforts to automate and systematize everything. When walking into the service department one is confronted with a bank of customer service agents, all wearing headsets and answering phone calls. Actually getting acknowledged in person takes quite some time.
Booking a service, even for a manufacturing fault, is an exercise in frustration. There’s no “yeah, we can just take a look now” in this situation. Rather those customer service agents book work they likely have no real understanding of from a technician they probably don’t know and all at arms length and powered by digital technologies. Oh and chances are the system won’t let them book anything in for another week or more. They can offer you a drink from the automatic coffee machine and no end of glossy magazines to look through, but there’s not warmth or personality on show.
I’m well aware that I sound like a relic from a past generation and a whining old person here. Look, I get it that many people want the ease and simplicity of impersonal communication channels and the flexibility to do everything online. But there’s still a significant number of people who still yearn for a bit of old-fashioned personalized service and as businesses we’re unwise to ignore their needs in a race to the bottom to make everything bland and generic.
I might get someone else’s mail from time to time. But I also get a chance to have an in-depth conversation with William about his theories of how we should introduce beavers into New Zealand to reduce willows choking our rivers. He may not be au fait with modern conservation approaches, but I’ll take his old school customer service style any day.
Ben Kepes is a Canterbury-based entrepreneur and professional board member. He accepts that he’s probably a nightmare customer.
