Monday, August 6, 2007

Bad Customer Service

We all get it, we all get it a lot. Working a CS based job for 10+ years made me very unsympathetic. If I'm paying my hard earned money for something then I expect to get the service I deserve. I still understand there are times when bad service happens and I can leave it alone. Today was not one of those days.

I called our upcoming hotel in Chicago to try and make some changes. The lady at the front desk was not very helpful, which happens and then she followed it up with "we're very busy right now" and then she hung up on me. Yeah, that doesn't work for me.

It turns out that you shouldn't hang up on someone who books hundreds of nights of hotels a year at your chain, they give a nice preferred card and a special 800 number to call for help. I ended up getting three email apologies and two phone calls about it today.

When I worked CS based jobs an actual call/mail complaint to a higher up was really bad for someone. I've seen people get fired or get on the "one more fuckup and you're fired" list based on a complaint like that. And these were places that didn't give out a "you spend five figures a year with us" card. I'm sure the lady at the front desk had a really good day. When the hotel general manager has to make a personal phone call to a guest because you fucked up, it can't do wonders for your raise potential.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

An employee of mine once mis-handled a transaction request for one of the 40 or so people that actually have the VIP tag at our place of business. You'd have thought that the gates of hell were ripped off after our higher-ups found out about it.

Yeah, bad CS is bad. Bad CS to a VIP, though... *cowers*