It's amazing how much we've been conditioned to accept bad service as the status quo. So much so that when we actually get good service we are often surprised to no end.

I spent the last week doing training for West Wind Web Connection in Arizona at the Arizona Golf Resort followed by three days at Southwest Fox. Both conferences went very well with expected attendance higher than anticipated and enthusiasm high especially given the rather glum news in recent months in regards to Visual FoxPro.

Good Service

But what really was surprising was the conference management staffs service that was provided. The West Wind Web Connection conference ended up needing a larger room at the very last minute and they accommodated us at the very last minute with a room change. The service staff constantly was around making sure that everything was ok and checking in on us frequently. The staff was friendly and polite from the top down all the way from management down to the wait staff and orderlies who would actually not try to diss you because you are the spoiled rich fat cat attending a conference at a resort <s> (you think that's funny - look around next time you are at a big hotel anywhere). There were several instances when there were deviations from schedules laid out in the program and the conference staff actually jumped in and within minutes rearranged food schedules and provided extra services for any number of things that had changed.

Now all of this sounds like it should be, right? But I've dealt with conference staff in many locations over the years and while I've on occasion have gotten pretty good service it's never been quite of this level of politeness, accomodation and especially in this case flexibility. These people really went out of their way to make sure our event went off without any hiccups.

Bad Service

So on the last day when I was ready to leave the hotel I was talking to several people at the conference who had a number of complaints about the hotel and the hotel staff (which is different than the conference staff since their in separate locations). Now I personally had nothing but a good experience with the personelle on the grounds and the front office. However several people I talked to had complaints about staff being rude or dropping the ball on things they were supposed to take care of (pickups aroudn the area especially). So when I went to check out of the hotel on the last day I got a load of this myself. It turns out my bill was split between myself and the SW Fox company and there was some confusion as what's what. After a fair bit of back and forth I was gruffly informed that I'd have to pay the whole bill, which of course was not correct. It took about 15 minutes of word wrestling  with two very unfriendly front office folks to get this resolved. OTOH, just a few days earlier, dealing with various other staff members in the same office the experience was just the opposite.

Now at any other hotel I would have actually expected that sort of behavior - I often end up with split bills like this and 80% of the time the hotel gets it wrong and I can almost count on spending a half an hour at a front counter trying to get this stuff sorted out. But in this situation it really highlighted the difference between 'expected service' and what service is supposed to be like in the first place.

It's all downhill

Given the fact that when we stay at a hotel that costs sometimes more than a couple of hundred of dollars a night (not in this case because it's off season but still) you'd expect that service would be high. But we've come to accept bad service in almost all aspects of our lives from customer service with our utilities, large corporations, and even in our most of our stores. That or you get that 'fake politeness' - like going to a Safeway and having every employee greet you with a "How are you doing sir?" which is just as bad. Good service is one that has a good attitude towards well serving the customer and while I understand that it's not always easy, it just really is discouraging sometimes to see just how badly things have gone from "the customer is always right" to "the customer is the lowest chain link in our profit margin"... <shrug>

Being in business myself and having to provide customer service for software products though I know myself how expensive it is to provide service properly. And it's also very hard to always be consistent since service is one of those things that can be affected by many external circumstances. I try as much as possible to make absolutely sure customers are happy, but at the same time I can also detect my own sneeriness at times when a customer will make unreasonable requests or ask for something that simply cannot be provided. The tendency to overreact and not provide the 'proper kind' of response is high and can be affected by many things such as my mood <g> and the level of the customers aggressiveness. However, it's the overall concept that counts and looking around at businesses in general today you can see that customer service is treated as another business expense that needs to be reigneded in with employees often trained with specific responses to certain situations so that the customer almost feels like he is in fact talking to an automaton.

It's been a long way down. I remember when I first arrived here in the states in 1982 and being literally amazed at how friendly people in general and in commerce were. Now it'd be the opposite - all we can try to do is reward those that take customer service serious and given them with our business. Unfortunately much of the time even that's not possible as bad service spans entire industries.