Customer Service

The Customer Service buzz has been around for years now. It has been well over twenty years since the buzz hit higher education and other service industries. Marie and I attended a customer service workshop as a part of our hospital orientation at Good Shepherd Hospital-Marshall yesterday.

One of their concepts of service is that if someone asks an employee where something is, they take you there. Sure, this can take five to ten minutes, but even if you are in the midst of three additional errands, you take them there.

Of course this didn't happen when we tried to find the room where Orientation was being held. Irony works like that.

As I have a propensity to be a crotchety ol' SOB from time to time with a wicked sense of humor, I also thought it would be nice to point out a sign at a local market where the Express Lane asks you to limit yourself to "about twelve" items. Seriously, about twelve.

That way the people who carry two things of the same thing can feel better about counting them as one. If you have 3 two-liter bottles of your favorite soda, you can count them as one since only one has to be scanned and the other two can be entered on the key pad somehow, making the process much quicker. I would believe it still prevents you from thinking of "bacon, lettuce, and tomato" as one item, but we're getting closer to sane change from people who think "a whole cart full" is close to "twelve." (Don't know how many times I've seen that at Wal-Mart all over America.)

Instead (yeah, six column inches on the screen and now I get to the "instead") I want to talk about two pieces of good customer service.

The first was at my local Brookshires store, the home of "about twelve." Today, I had one item, a bag of chips for Marie's lunch. I was at the back of a longish line when a woman said, "Sir, I can get you over here." When the man at the back of the line on the next lane over heard this, he moved over and got to the head of the line. He had about a dozen items in a hand basket. The woman looked at him and said, "Sir, pleas let me get the man in the line behind you first since he has only one item." I don't know if he liked this or not, but I loved it... and her!

As for the other great piece of customer service, Friday night Marie and I went to Longivew, Texas and ate at Red Lobster. Our waitress was fabulous! Her name was Jessica, JK on her badge, and she was great! Friendly, always there to refill drinks, remembering what we were drinking, great with food suggestions and very very prompt. On top of that, the food was fabulous. It was probably the best Red Lobster we had ever eaten in period end of sentence. Ever. Kudos for the Longview Red Lobster and for JK!

Remember, tell someone who has made a difference in your life that they have. It goes a long way with them... and it doesn't hurt to pay the complement either.