The New Customer Service

A couple years back, my family and I stopped at a local Friendly's for ice cream. I decided on their most wondrous creation, the Reese's Pieces Sundae. It's huge, it's decadent, it's wonderful, and I hadn't had one since my high school days, so that's what I ordered. A few minutes later our waitress brought our sundaes to the table, and in front of me she sat a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Sundae.

"Excuse me," I spoke up, "but this is not what I ordered."

"I know," she replied, and left offering no further explanation, nor making any effort to correct the situation.

I sat stunned as the rest of my family burst into laughter. When she came back again, I repeated that the sundae she had delivered was not what I ordered. "Do you mean you want me to have them make a whole new sundae?" she asked, her tone of voice making it clear that this would be a huge inconvenience. Yes, that's what I wanted, but rather than risk having a Reese's Pieces & Spit Sundae brought to me, I decided I would eat what I was given. Within another five minutes, our waitress reappeared once more, this time with a small paper cup filled with Reese's Pieces. "Here, you should at least have these," she smiled as she put them in front of me, and left again before I could even respond to the bizarre situation.

And that's where it ended. She made no real effort to replace the incorrect sundae with what I had actually ordered, and never once apologized for the error. She could not be bothered to either do her job correctly or remedy the situation once her error had been pointed out. The customer service here was non-existent.

Over the years, this has come to be a running a joke with my family: "Let's go to Friendly's and see if we can actually get what we order." The complete lack of customer service, coupled with the complete obliviousness to the inconvenience she created, was one of those once-in-a-lifetime situations, right?

Umm...

I had an appointment with my doctor this afternoon. As per usual, after the visit was complete, the doctor sent me out to the front desk to have one of the office staff schedule my next visit and set up a schedule for some tests I must have done. I always make certain to get a receipt for each visit, so that when my insurance statements come in I can reconcile and make sure everything is as it should be.

I asked the girl at the desk for my receipt, and she began entering stuff into her computer. Suddenly, a confused look came over her face.

"Were you here today?" she asked.

"Yes," I slowly began to reply, a bit taken aback by the question. "I just finished with the doctor."

"Were you here twice today?"

What the hell kind of question is that? Of course I wasn't there twice, but all I could say in the moment was, "I don't even know how to respond to that question."

"Because I see today's date on here twice..." she trailed off, and then printed out a sheet of paper which she handed to me. "Now, this is your receipt, but it's not correct," she declared, indicating that, in her mind, our transaction was complete.

Instead of handing me a receipt for a doctor's visit, she handed me a receipt for a doctor's visit plus a urinalysis plus another procedure plus a VISA credit...a laundry list of things that did not occur during my visit.

"These charges aren't mine!" I stammered.

"Yes, I know," she smiled - same tone of voice, same "this is all I'm going to do for you" attitude as the Friendly's waitress years ago. But this time, I wasn't going to be cowed so easily!

"May have a correct receipt?" I asked, my voice underscoring my displeasure.

She looked stunned that I would ask for this. "OK, let me see if I can find the error," she sighed as she began combing through pile after pile of receipts - obviously the day's appointments.

Once through the stack. Twice through the stack. Third time through, I piped up again: "Maybe it would be easier to fix my receipt by taking off the charges that don't belong to me."

"But I can't remove charges," she stated matter-of-factly. "Only the accounts manager can do that." She resumed plowing through her stack of papers.

After almost twenty minutes, she triumphantly pulled out one paper. "Here it is!" There had been another patient that day also named Bryan (with a vastly different last name), and his charges had been inadvertently put on my account. Then she added, "But, I can't fix it, because I can't take charges off."

I measured my words so as not to scream at this lady for wasting nearly half an hour of my time. I very slowly and clearly said, "I would like a correct receipt for my appointment, please."

"But, I can't do that," she maintained.

"Then, please call whomever you need to call, or do whatever you need to do to have someone fix it. I understand that there was an error, but that's your concern. I would like to have a correct receipt."

"But I don't have her number!"

"Then you need to contact someone whose number you do have, who can fix this."

Another sigh. Then, she picks up the phone to call the office manager (she has the office manager's number, but not the accounts manager's?). I hear her leave a message.

"She's not home," she dutifully reported to me.

"So how do you intend to fix this?" I asked.

"Well, you can either wait here until she calls back, or you can come back tomorrow for a corrected receipt."

It was pulling teeth to get that far with her. In the end, I left without a corrected receipt; only with the promise that I will be called tomorrow morning to be told the corrections have been made and to make arrangements to have the corrected receipt delivered to me.

Again, there was no effort made towards customer service. She would have been perfectly content to send me off with an incorrect receipt containing someone else's charges, just as the waitress at Friendly's was perfectly content to present me with something other than what I ordered. No thought crossed either of their minds that the inconvenience to me, the customer, might not be best for business. No effort made of their own volition on either part to actually correct the situation; indeed, each saw the little they did do to be an imposition on their time rather than a service to the customer.

As I was writing this post, my phone rang. It was the lady from the doctor's office. She called to tell me that she had forgotten to indicate some of the blood tests the doctor wants done on my test order form, so she wanted to know where I was going to have that work done so that she could fax the additional test requests there as well. Her reason for forgetting to indicate those tests? "Well, you had me a little flustered earlier."

Oh. I see. It was MY fault. Could there have been a more perfect postscript to the story? Sigh...

AIG Executive's Public Resignation Letter

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Saw this over at The Consumerist (a site you really should bookmark and read regularly!) The letter, which was puiblished in the New York Times was enough to give me pause in my anger at AIG in general, though I'm not sure it swings me around to their side; the reader comments are even more interesting. Does it change your mind at all? As the poll question asks, do you feel bad for this guy? Or is he grandstanding?:


DEAR Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in - or responsible for - the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.

After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company - during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 - we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.

I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.

You and I have never met or spoken to each other, so I'd like to tell you about myself. I was raised by schoolteachers working multiple jobs in a world of closing steel mills. My hard work earned me acceptance to M.I.T., and the institute's generous financial aid enabled me to attend. I had fulfilled my American dream.

I started at this company in 1998 as an equity trader, became the head of equity and commodity trading and, a couple of years before A.I.G.'s meltdown last September, was named the head of business development for commodities. Over this period the equity and commodity units were consistently profitable - in most years generating net profits of well over $100 million. Most recently, during the dismantling of A.I.G.-F.P., I was an integral player in the pending sale of its well-regarded commodity index business to UBS. As you know, business unit sales like this are crucial to A.I.G.'s effort to repay the American taxpayer.

The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity - directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers.

I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country's call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn't defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut.

My guess is that in October, when you learned of these retention contracts, you realized that the employees of the financial products unit needed some incentive to stay and that the contracts, being both ethical and useful, should be left to stand. That's probably why A.I.G. management assured us on three occasions during that month that the company would "live up to its commitment" to honor the contract guarantees.

That may be why you decided to accelerate by three months more than a quarter of the amounts due under the contracts. That action signified to us your support, and was hardly something that one would do if he truly found the contracts "distasteful."

That may also be why you authorized the balance of the payments on March 13.

At no time during the past six months that you have been leading A.I.G. did you ask us to revise, renegotiate or break these contracts - until several hours before your appearance last week before Congress.

I think your initial decision to honor the contracts was both ethical and financially astute, but it seems to have been politically unwise. It's now apparent that you either misunderstood the agreements that you had made - tacit or otherwise - with the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, various members of Congress and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York, or were not strong enough to withstand the shifting political winds.

You've now asked the current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. to repay these earnings. As you can imagine, there has been a tremendous amount of serious thought and heated discussion about how we should respond to this breach of trust.

As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.'s assurances that the contracts would be honored. They are now angry about having been misled by A.I.G.'s promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you.

The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to "name and shame," and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats - even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press.

So what am I to do? There's no easy answer. I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. Some might argue that members of my profession have been overpaid, and I wouldn't disagree.

That is why I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.'s or the federal government's budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need.

On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes. In light of the uncertainty over the ultimate taxation and legal status of this payment, the actual amount I donate may be less - in fact, it may end up being far less if the recent House bill raising the tax on the retention payments to 90 percent stands. Once all the money is donated, you will immediately receive a list of all recipients.

This choice is right for me. I wish others at A.I.G.-F.P. luck finding peace with their difficult decision, and only hope their judgment is not clouded by fear.

Mr. Liddy, I wish you success in your commitment to return the money extended by the American government, and luck with the continued unwinding of the company's diverse businesses - especially those remaining credit default swaps. I'll continue over the short term to help make sure no balls are dropped, but after what's happened this past week I can't remain much longer - there is too much bad blood. I'm not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at least Attorney General Blumenthal should be relieved that I'll leave under my own power and will not need to be "shoved out the door."

Sincerely,

Jake DeSantis

The Cost of Being "Nice"

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No sooner do I put up a post declaring that nothing has caught my eye or ear to rant about lately than, sure enough, Stupidity pops its ugly head out of its hole and yells "Hey Bryan...over here!"

Pennsylvania's Liquor Control Board announced that this month it will begin a campaign to train the state's 4000+ State Store employees in the art of common courtesy. Basically, how to be nice to customers.

For those of you who live in states that do not have the bizarre and outdated alcohol laws that we have here in good ol' PA, the State Store is the only place where you can purchase wine and liquor. Let me stress: the ONLY place. It is, in essence, a government-imposed monopoly. Apparently, state-wide, the feeling of those people who work behind the registers at these State Stores is "Why should I have to act humanly towards these people? It's not like they can take their business elsewhere!"

As a part of what the LCB's chief executive Joe Conti calls "...the renaissance of the Liquor Control Board," an effort needs to be made to correct this perceived behavior. Hence, a training program focusing on how to pleasantly greet a customer, perhaps help with the customer's purchase, and how to thank the customer and invite him back after the transaction is complete.

You know: manners. The stuff your parents should have taught you when you were a child.

Now, I have no problem whatsoever with the idea of teaching those in any service-oriented job the importance of being polite and helpful to the customer. It seems, sadly, that basic customer service is swiftly going the way of the dinosaur; customer service that goes above and beyond to help with a purchase or answer questions is rarer still. More than one pundit has declared recently that those businesses which begin practicing stronger customer service are the ones most likely to survive and perhaps thrive in this tough economic world.

I should also point out that, in my dealings with State Store employees over the years, I have never run into a clerk who was less than pleasant. Where these rudely grunting oafs of employees who need to be retrained are I don't know. If we're going to teach anyone how to better treat the customer, it should be the nation's grocery store checkout folks. "Lesson one: Don't chomp your gum while scanning my produce. Lesson two: I'm right in front of you. Don't yell over my head to the next checkout person about how hard you partied last night..."

But, for whatever reason, the State feels this is necessary. OK. So how hard can this be? Maybe a day-long seminar with a morning lesson and afternoon role-playing, run on location by each store's manager?

No. To do this, the state of Pennsylvania feels it necessary to hire an outside consulting firm, the Pittsburgh-based Solutions 21, to spend the next year (!) facilitating this training at a cost of over $170,000 dollars.

Let me repeat that: A full year at more than $170,000 to teach people to say "Hello," "May I help you?" and "Thank you, please stop by again!" with a smile on their face.

And it gets better: The president of Solutions 21, the consulting company hired at this unreal rate to perform this virtually unnecessary training? Married to the LCB's Pittsburgh area regional manager. Of course, they see "no conflict of interest" in this arrangement.

Let me make this offer to Governor Rendell: I'll save the state thousands of dollars right now. I don't even ask for reimbursement at all - it's this simple: print out the announcement I've written below and pass it out to all state store employees.

Attention all PA State Store Employees - new procedures in effect immediately!

1. When a customer enters the store, smile and say "Hello!"

2. If the customer appears to be struggling with his choice of beverage, offer to help by smiling and saying "May I help you find something?"

3. If a customer asks a question, smile and answer it to the best of your ability.

4. After concluding the transaction with the customer, smile and say "Thank you for your business. Please stop by again!"

And People Wonder Why I Don't Drive

You have to see this one to believe it, courtesy of OCRegister: the video is from the surveillance camera at a convenience store where a gentleman "parked" his truck while he briefly went inside to get a soda. When he returned to the parking lot, his truck was gone.

Since he left the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked while he went into the store, he assumed the truck had been stolen. After all, it was here a moment ago, right?

He called 911 to report the stolen truck, and the responding officer had the store pull the surveillance tape, which revealed what really happened.

These are the people they give licenses to, folks - and yet people ask me why I don't want to be out on the roads with them...