You may remember that number 1 on my #10thingsilove post was girl Saturdays with my friends, trawling the shops and eating good food. Well, this week it happened today, Sunday :-).
It was equally pleasant, perhaps more so because the malls were not madly hectic like the are on a Saturday. The only downside is that the shops close at 3pm. The upside of this downside is that the bank balance doesn’t suffer so much – so there’s a strategy!
I had a really nice experience at Woolies. Completely unaware of the time, I went to Woolies in Glenvista and as I walked up they started to close the doors. I was about to turn around when the floor manager called over and invited me in. She said she’d close after me. I was sooo gratelful that I left a compliment on Hello Peter. Well worth doing when one gets a good experience or even one that wasn’t so good. Today it was a compliment.
South Africa is not a place where customer service is high on the agenda, and we often put up with bad service for fear of being victimised (not complaining when the food at a restaurant is cold or something, for fear that the waiter will spit into it), or getting into an argument with someone who really should not be facing the public.
In the last 3 months I have got really good service at 3 different places (sad to say that it was only 3 places in 3 months, it should be much more) – on 2 of those occasions I left compliments on Hello Peter. But I didn’t leave the corresponding complaints when I got poor service.
Well, you know about the Woolies one. The other was at Big Boy Scooters when I bought my pitbike. My warranty hadn’t been loaded on their system so I was not able to activate it online. Frustrating because I had to activate it within 48 hrs or so or risk losing it. They were very efficient and I complimented them on Hello Peter.
The other good experience was at Pick and Pay (I know…can you believe it?). Our Pick and Pay has a self-service veggie weighing machine. It works well. But when the label roll is finished it is a bummer. Ok, so I decided to do the rest of my shopping and come back to it at the end and let someone else go to the manager to sort it out. After 30 mins the machine was still inactive. I know I should’ve sorted it out 30 mins before, it doesn’t pay to pass the buck. In this case, the manager came and changed the label roll himself. I was most impressed.
As consumers we have the power to influence the service we get. It requires work. Not accepting below standard service. And complimenting when the service was really good. It will eventually reach a tipping point and good service will become the norm not the exception so that it even becomes a blog post.
Have you ever logged a compliment and complaint on Hello Peter?
Do you give feedback when the service sucked wasn’t so good?
Do you compliment good service?