Skip to main content

Dissecting Service

I met an interesting Uber driver on my way to the airport recently. He had been a career insurance salesman and was doing this Uber thing for fun not the money. It was before 4 pm and I was his last ride for the day. We chatted about selling life insurance and what made for a compelling customer experience. After a long day it was refreshing to hear a voice that was not pursuing goals like crazy and enjoying his life and conversations with random strangers. 

I spend a lot of my professional life dissecting customer experience and its second nature for me to mentally catalog both the good and bad ones that I have. This was definitely a good one. I did not have to wait too long for the bad. At the airport, I wanted to grab a bite and the only reasonable option was a bagel store. Two young women were running the place and my repeated efforts to get their attention to place my order failed. 

They simply refused to acknowledge me and there were no other customers anywhere in sight. It was a truly bizarre experience - I left there confused and still hungry. Later that evening I did get something to eat and could put some distance between the event and my feelings. It felt like a good time to dissect the negative experience more professionally. 

First thing that came to mind is the company in question is completely devoid of a customer experience culture. If there was any, I would have seen some shred of it even in a negative encounter. No surprise that the average salaries are very low - which would only attract transient or sub-par (or both) talent. 

Employee engagement on the job from what I could see was completely missing. The two women who completely ignored me might have worked their shift and getting ready to leave - for their salary, they could not be blamed if they did not want to extend their work day past end of shift. The display case where the bagels sat looked chaotic - like someone had rifled through stuff and not bothered to get things back in order - again likely a consequence of not being paid enough to do anything beyond what is minimally needed. 

No surprise either that the Glassdoor reviews are terrible. This is not a place anyone dreams of working. I am thinking if I was one of those young ladies and I was motivated, I would be trying hard to find work at a Starbucks or a Costco to improve my quality of life. If I was one of those who like to whine and complain then I would do little to change my situation but hate it anyway. Either way, my customer would be left holding the bag - my mind and heart would not be engaged in providing good service. It's amazing what a little space from a negative event and a good meal will do to a person's perspective. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more