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Where has all the service gone?

March 13th, 2023 by Kenneth Abrahams

All in one day, it all happened in one day. Actually, less than 24 hours and several interactions. I am talking about one of my favorite topics; service, or to be more precise, customer service. Early one morning, I opened an email from a friend, it was a short video shot in a new Amazon Go store. These stores have no cashiers and in the video that he sent me I didn’t see any staff of any kind. You simply scan the Amazon Go App on your phone, go through the store and take any items you want, then when you leave the store it automatically scans the items you have and charges whatever credit card you have in the app. To me it was a bit eerie.

Later that afternoon, I was going to run a few errands. One of which was to pick up our monthly meat share. My wife and I are big fans of supporting local farms and we have a CSA with a meat farm in Massachusetts. Our meat pickup is in the center of town, in a parking lot, and the day was a bit cold so I thought I would grab a couple of hot chocolates and some munchkins for the people that were distributing the shares that day. I went into a Dunks near my house and as I often do, went inside instead of the drive-thru. Crazy I know, but I like interaction with people. There were two people sitting at a table and no one waiting in line. At first, I only saw one staff member working and felt bad that he was working the drive-thru and had to wait on in-store customers as well. Or at least I thought he was going to wait on me, at some point. For several minutes, I stood there and a few times it appeared he was going to come to take my order. Nope, he was just going to the racks to grab a doughnut for a drive-thru customer. Then, a second employee walked into my field of vision, great, I thought one of the two of them would grab my order. Shortly after I spotted the second staff member, he too walked in my direction. At this point I had been in the store about five minutes, and I figured that he was absolutely coming to help. You guessed it, another doughnut for drive-thru customer. After they each walked by me one more time, doing their best to avoid eye contact, I decided I had spent enough time standing there, turned, and walked out. Above the drive-thru there is a clock telling staff what the elapsed time is from order to pick up.  While I was standing there, I noticed that for most drive-thru customers the wait from order to completed transaction was about a minute. Maybe they need one of those clocks above the counter. As I sat in my car, I briefly thought about going through the drive-thru but decided that if Dunks can’t train their staff better, they weren’t getting my money.

Later that night, I had to go to the grocery store near my house. It was a bit late, around 8:45pm and they closed at 9. When I walked in, I noticed that a lot of the produce had already been put away and the refrigerated sections had something that looked like shades pulled down over them. Of course, the service counters were long closed, they close 2 hours before the store does, but what was a bit unexpected was the meat cases were almost bare and even the rotisserie chickens had been taken into the back to rest for the night. It was clear that the employees wanted to walk out the door as close to 9PM as possible. Despite a lack of product or service, there was certainly no discount on the bill.

Customer service was slipping long before COVID hit, honestly the pandemic simply made it worse. Airlines have been bad for a long time. Multiple stories of passengers sitting in aircraft for hours as the plane sat motionless on the tarmac. That grocery store that I mentioned earlier used to carry every customer’s groceries out to their car for them and as you exited the store there was a sign telling you not to tip the employees, it was their pleasure to serve you. Now they will only assist you if asked.

For some businesses, customer service is their life blood. They place huge value on not only providing that white glove treatment but in establishing and maintaining the relationships with their clients. As I have mentioned in the past, we support local agriculture in the form of CSA’s. For those that are unfamiliar with the term a CSA is Community Shared Agriculture. Every farm that offers these does it differently, some require you to not only pay but to also work the land. We have had 2 CSAs for a number of years now. One is a meat farm and every month we get a cooler of meat. It is like the Forrest Gump box of chocolates; you never know what is inside that cooler. You can’t request specific products, but you are allowed to exclude certain items like no pork, or nothing processed like sausages. Although the farm goes to several farmers markets, they rely on their CSA family to make their business work. Kim, the farmer, knows most of her CSA members by name and is always asking about their work or family. Because of the quality of the product and her relationship with all the shareholders, people remain members for years. When the pandemic hit, despite many other stores raising their prices, she kept her price the same. Often bringing extra meat on pickup days for people to purchase. Our vegetable share is very similar, but they also have pick your own as part of the share. On certain weeks, along with the box of veggies, you get to go out in the field and pick whatever is ripe that week. Beans, strawberries, blueberries, even apples and peaches when they are in season.

Doctors never really entered my mind when talking about customer service. When you really think about it, bedside manner is customer service. Recently, I had to have minor surgery done. Fear not, I am just fine. For this, I had two medical teams working on me. Because of the type of surgery and the location, the doctor did the first part and then the plastic surgeon came in to close it up and ensure that the scar was going to be as minimal as possible. Both surgeons took the time to explain what was going to happen in simple, easy to understand, terms. At no point did I feel rushed, and they answered any questions that I and my wife had. Since I was going to be awake the whole time, I was even asked what kind of music I liked to listen to. During the actual procedure, they chatted with me about what they were doing along with a whole host of other topics. Going into the procedure I wasn’t nervous, and I felt very well taken care of. Like my case was the most important one they were going to do that day, even though one of the surgeons had seven other patients that day.

Customer service is and always has been one of the things we focus on at FUN Enterprises/SPEAK Educators. We see people on some of the best days of their lives, graduations, milestone birthdays, that first family weekend for a first gen college student. For people that don’t plan events for a living, those days can also be emotionally trying. Our goal is to reduce their stress and allow them to enjoy their day. Customer service maybe harder to find but it is certainly not dead. For me, I will keep searching for and blogging about the good, bad, and ugly of customer care. Please let me know if you have had any very good or very bad experiences.

About the Author

Ken Abrahams is the CBO, Chief Blog Officer, and Vice President for Client Relations at FUN Enterprises. He is now also the main point of contact for SPEAK Educators. This month (at some point) he will take on a new role for the very first time, grandfather. Stay tuned, pictures to follow.