I’ve had to reflect on the customer service experience a bit lately. As a consultant I provide professional services to clients, who rightly enough expect to be treated with respect and have the benefit of my full attention while I am providing those services. As Graeme Simsion and others point out, you wouldn’t expect to pay $100 or more to see your doctor and have him spend 10 minutes telling you how drunk he got the day before - you would quite rightly be horrified - and so it is with consultants and their clients.
If old-fashioned personal service (what you need, when you need it, in a form you can use) is back in style, where does that leave me as a consumer? I don’t want to disparage individuals, because everyone has a bad day now and then - but if an organisation has a problem, then I think we as consumers are right to talk about it amongst ourselves. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about to suggest that a positive experience yields a number of recommendations for a business, and the corollary is also true - that an unhappy client/customer will tell a lot of people that they are unhappy with you and why.
My experiences at Cirque Du Soleil and The Ridge Restaurant were uniformly positive and I would recommend them to anyone - my experience at wagamama not uniformly positive at all. The company I work for prides itself on providing solutions not just answers, so I will attempt to identify what could be fixed where things are a bit broken, and what is worthy of praise and emulation where things are going well.
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