Tag Archives: service

Idea Soup

Customer Service Meets Customer Arrogance

Contrary to popular opinion espoused by retail management, service companies and business “gurus”, the customer is not always right. In fact, the customer is sometimes arrogant, ignorant and wrong.

From the Guardian:

I was a waitress at Applebee’s restaurant in Saint Louis. I was fired Wednesday for posting a picture on Reddit.com of a note a customer left on a bill. I posted it on the web as a light-hearted joke.

This didn’t even happen at my table. The note was left for another server, who allowed me to take a picture of it at the end of the night.

Someone had scribbled on the receipt, “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?”

I assumed the customer’s signature was illegible, but I quickly started receiving messages containing Facebook profile links and websites, asking me to confirm the identity of the customer. I refused to confirm any of them, and all were incorrect.

I worked with the Reddit moderators to remove any personal information. I wanted to protect the identity of both my fellow server and the customer. I had no intention of starting a witch-hunt or hurting anyone.

Now I’ve been fired.

The person who wrote the note came across an article about it, called the Applebee’s location, and demanded everyone be fired — me, the server who allowed me to take the picture, the manager on duty at the time, the manager not on duty at the time, everyone. It seems I was fired not because Applebee’s was represented poorly, not because I did anything illegal or against company policy, but because I embarrassed this person.

In light of the situation, I would like to make a statement on behalf of wait staff everywhere: We make $3.50 an hour. Most of my paychecks are less than pocket change because I have to pay taxes on the tips I make.

After sharing my tips with hosts, bussers, and bartenders, I make less than $9 an hour on average, before taxes. I am expected to skip bathroom breaks if we are busy. I go hungry all day if I have several busy tables to work. I am expected to work until 1:30am and then come in again at 10:30am to open the restaurant.

I have worked 12-hour double shifts without a chance to even sit down. I am expected to portray a canned personality that has been found to be least offensive to the greatest amount of people. And I am expected to do all of this, every day, and receive change, or even nothing, in return. After all that, I can be fired for “embarrassing” someone, who directly insults his or her server on religious grounds.

In this economy, $3.50 an hour doesn’t cut it. I can’t pay half my bills. Like many, I would love to see a reasonable, non-tip-dependent wage system for service workers like they have in other countries. But the system being flawed is not an excuse for not paying for services rendered.

I need tips to pay my bills. All waiters do. We spend an hour or more of our time befriending you, making you laugh, getting to know you, and making your dining experience the best it can be. We work hard. We care. We deserve to be paid for that.

I am trying to stand up for all of us who work for just a few dollars an hour at places like Applebee’s. Whether a chain steakhouse or a black-tie establishment, tipping is not optional. It is how we get paid.

I posted a picture to make people laugh, but now I want to make a serious point: Things like this happen to servers all the time. People seem to think that the easiest way to save money on a night out is to skip the tip.

I can’t understand why I was fired over this. I was well liked and respected at Applebee’s. My sales were high, my managers had no problems with me, and I was even hoping to move up to management soon. When I posted this, I didn’t represent Applebee’s in a bad light. In fact, I didn’t represent them at all.

I did my best to protect the identity of all parties involved. I didn’t break any specific guidelines in the company handbook – I checked. But because this person got embarrassed that their selfishness was made public, Applebee’s has made it clear that they would rather lose a dedicated employee than an angry customer. That’s a policy I can’t understand.

I am equally baffled about how a religious tithe is in any way related to paying for services at a restaurant. I can understand why someone could be upset with an automatic gratuity. However, it’s a plainly stated Applebee’s policy that a tip is added automatically for parties over eight like the one this customer was part of. I cannot control that kind of tip; it’s done by the computer that the orders are put into. I’ve been stiffed on tips before, but this is the first time I’ve seen the “Big Man” used as reasoning.

Obviously the person who wrote this note wanted it seen by someone. It’s strange that now that the audience is wider than just the server, the person is ashamed.

I have no agenda here. I seek no revenge against the note writer. I have no interest in exposing their identity, and, at this point, I’m not even sure I want my job back. I was just trying to make a joke, but I came home unemployed.

I’ve been waiting tables to save up some money so I could finally go to college, so I could get an education that would qualify me for a job that doesn’t force me to sell my personality for pocket change.

While this story has garnered immense media attention, my story is not uncommon. Bad tips and harsh notes are all part of the job. People get fired to keep customers happy every day.

As this story has gotten popular, I’ve received inquiries as to where people can send money to support me. As a broke kid trying to get into college, it’s certainly appealing, but I’d really rather you make a difference to your next server. I’d rather you keep that money and that generosity for the next time you eat out.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Customer receipt courtesy of the Guardian.

Technica

Retailing: An Engineering Problem

Traditional retailers look at retailing primarily as a marketing and customer acquisition and relationship problem. For Amazon, it’s more of an engineering and IT problem with solutions to be found in innovation and optimization.

From Technology Review:

Why do some stores succeed while others fail? Retailers constantly struggle with this question, battling one another in ways that change with each generation. In the late 1800s, architects ruled. Successful merchants like Marshall Field created palaces of commerce that were so gorgeous shoppers rushed to come inside. In the early 1900s, mail order became the “killer app,” with Sears Roebuck leading the way. Toward the end of the 20th century, ultra-efficient suburban discounters like Target and Walmart conquered all.

Now the tussles are fiercest in online retailing, where it’s hard to tell if anyone is winning. Retailers as big as Walmart and as small as Tweezerman.com all maintain their own websites, catering to an explosion of customer demand. Retail e-commerce sales expanded 15 percent in the U.S in 2012—seven times as fast as traditional retail. But price competition is relentless, and profit margins are thin to nonexistent. It’s easy to regard this $186 billion market as a poisoned prize: too big to ignore, too treacherous to pursue.

Even the most successful online retailer, Amazon.com, has a business model that leaves many people scratching their heads. Amazon is on track to ring up $75 billion in worldwide sales this year. Yet it often operates in the red; last quarter, Amazon posted a $41 million loss. Amazon’s founder and chief executive officer, Jeff Bezos, is indifferent to short-term earnings, having once quipped that when the company achieved profitability for a brief stretch in 1995, “it was probably a mistake.”

Look more closely at Bezos’s company, though, and its strategy becomes clear. Amazon is constantly plowing cash back into its business. Its secretive advanced-research division, Lab 126, works on next-generation Kindles and other mobile devices. More broadly, Amazon spends heavily to create the most advanced warehouses, the smoothest customer-service channels, and other features that help it grab an ever-larger share of the market. As former Amazon manager Eugene Wei wrote in a recent blog post, “Amazon’s core business model does generate a profit with most every transaction … The reason it isn’t showing a profit is because it’s undertaken a massive investment to support an even larger sales base.”

Much of that investment goes straight into technology. To Amazon, retailing looks like a giant engineering problem. Algorithms define everything from the best way to arrange a digital storefront to the optimal way of shipping a package. Other big retailers spend heavily on advertising and hire a few hundred engineers to keep systems running. Amazon prefers a puny ad budget and a payroll packed with thousands of engineering graduates from the likes of MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Caltech.

Other big merchants are getting the message. Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, two years ago opened an R&D center in Silicon Valley where it develops its own search engines and looks for startups to buy. But competing on Amazon’s terms doesn’t stop with putting up a digital storefront or creating a mobile app. Walmart has gone as far as admitting that it may have to rethink what its stores are for. To equal Amazon’s flawless delivery, this year it even floated the idea of recruiting shoppers out of its aisles to play deliveryman, whisking goods to customers who’ve ordered online.

Amazon is a tech innovator by necessity, too. The company lacks three of conventional retailing’s most basic elements: a showroom where customers can touch the wares; on-the-spot salespeople who can woo shoppers; and the means for customers to take possession of their goods the instant a sale is complete. In one sense, everything that Amazon’s engineers create is meant to make these fundamental deficits vanish from sight.

Amazon’s cunning can be seen in the company’s growing patent portfolio. Since 1994, Amazon.com and a subsidiary, Amazon Technologies, have won 1,263 patents. (By contrast, Walmart has just 53.) Each Amazon invention is meant to make shopping on the site a little easier, a little more seductive, or to trim away costs. Consider U.S. Patent No. 8,261,983, on “generating customized packaging” which came into being in late 2012.

“We constantly try to drive down the percentage of air that goes into a shipment,” explains Dave Clark, the Amazon vice president who oversees the company’s nearly 100 warehouses, known as fulfillment centers. The idea of shipping goods in a needlessly bulky box (and paying a few extra cents to United Parcel Service or other carriers) makes him shudder. Ship nearly a billion packages a year, and those pennies add up. Amazon over the years has created more than 40 sizes of boxes– but even that isn’t enough. That’s the glory of Amazon’s packaging patent: when a customer’s odd pairing of items creates a one-of-a-kind shipment, Amazon now has systems that will compute the best way to pack that order and create a perfect box for it within 30 minutes.

For thousands of online merchants, it’s easier to live within Amazon’s ecosystem than to compete. So small retailers such as EasyLunchboxes.com have moved their inventory into Amazon’s warehouses, where they pay a commission on each sale for shipping and other services. That is becoming a highly lucrative business for Amazon, says Goldman Sachs analyst Heath Terry. He predicts Amazon will reap $3.5 billion in cash flow from third-party shipping in 2014, creating a very profitable side business that he values at $38 billion—about 20 percent of the company’s overall stock market value.

Jousting directly with Amazon is tougher. Researchers at Internet Retailer calculate that Amazon’s revenue exceeds that of its next 12 competitors combined. In a regulatory filing earlier this year, Target—the third-largest retailer in the U.S.—conceded that its “digital sales represented an immaterial amount of total sales.” For other online entrants, the most prudent strategies generally involve focusing on areas that the big guy hasn’t conquered yet, such as selling services, online “flash sales” that snare impulse buyers who can’t pass up a deal, or particularly challenging categories such as groceries. Yet many, if not most, of these upstarts are losing money.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Amazon fullfillment center, Scotland. Courtesy of Amazon / Wired.

Idea Soup, tD, Technica

Please Press 1 to Avoid Phone Menu Hell

Good customer service once meant that a store or service employee would know you by name. This person would know your previous purchasing habits and your preferences; this person would know the names of your kids and your dog. Great customer service once meant that an employee could use this knowledge to anticipate your needs or personalize a specific deal. Well, this type of service still exists — in some places — but many businesses have outsourced it to offshore call center personnel or to machines, or both. Service may seem personal, but it’s not — service is customized to suit your profile, but it’s not personal in the same sense that once held true.

And, to rub more salt into the customer service wound, businesses now use their automated phone systems seemingly to shield themselves from you, rather than to provide you with the service you want. After all, when was the last time you managed to speak to a real customer service employee after making it through “please press 1 for English“, the poor choice of musak or sponsored ads and the never-ending phone menus?

Now thanks to an enterprising and extremely patient soul there is an answer to phone menu hell.

Welcome to Please Press 1. Founded by Nigel Clarke (alumnus of 400 year old Dame Alice Owens School in London), Please Press 1 provides shortcuts for customer service phone menus for many of the top businesses in Britain [ed: we desperately need this service in the United States].

 

From the MailOnline:

A frustrated IT manager who has spent seven years making 12,000 calls to automated phone centres has launched a new website listing ‘short cut’ codes which can shave up to eight minutes off calls.

Nigel Clarke, 53, has painstakingly catalogued the intricate phone menus of hundreds of leading multi-national companies – some of which have up to 80 options.

He has now formulated his results into the website pleasepress1.com, which lists which number options to press to reach the desired department.

The father-of-three, from Fawkham, Kent, reckons the free service can save consumers more than eight minutes by cutting out up to seven menu options.

For example, a Lloyds TSB home insurance customer who wishes to report a water leak would normally have to wade through 78 menu options over seven levels to get through to the correct department.

But the new service informs callers that the combination 1-3-2-1-1-5-4 will get them straight through – saving over four minutes of waiting.

Mr Clarke reckons the service could save consumers up to one billion minutes a year.

He said: ‘Everyone knows that calling your insurance or gas company is a pain but for most, it’s not an everyday problem.

‘However, the cumulative effect of these calls is really quite devastating when you’re moving house or having an issue.

‘I’ve been working in IT for over 30 years and nothing gets me riled up like having my time wasted through inefficient design.

‘This is why I’ve devoted the best part of seven years to solving this issue.’

Mr Clarke describes call centre menu options as the ‘modern equivalent of Dante’s circles of hell’.

He sites the HMRC as one of the worst offenders, where callers can take up to six minutes to reach the correct department.

As one of the UK’s busiest call centres, the Revenue receives 79 million calls per year, or a potential 4.3 million working hours just navigating menus.

Mr Clarke believes that with better menu design, at least three million caller hours could be saved here alone.

He began his quest seven years ago as a self-confessed ‘call centre menu enthusiast’.

‘The idea began with the frustration of being met with a seemingly endless list of menu options,’ he said.

‘Whether calling my phone, insurance or energy company, they each had a different and often worse way of trying to “help” me.

‘I could sit there for minutes that seemed like hours, trying to get through their phone menus only to end up at the wrong place and having to redial and start again.’

He began noting down the menu options and soon realised he could shave several minutes off the waiting time.

Mr Clarke said: ‘When I called numbers regularly, I started keeping notes of the options to press. The numbers didn’t change very often and then it hit me.

Read the entire article here and visit Please Press 1, here.

Images courtesy of Time and Please Press 1.