"Our Director of Customer Service is Helen Wait. If you want customer service, go to Helen Wait."
Is anyone reading this old enough to remember newspaper boys?
They were usually elementary or jr. high age kids who would make their delivery rounds by bicycle early in the morning before school started. Part of their job was to deliver the paper TO YOUR PORCH. Anything less would usually result in a call to the newspaper, who would dispatch the kid back out to knock on your door and hand you your paper, along with an apology.
Later, for whatever reason, the rules were changed. I guess the kids' work ethic was beginning to slip, so the newspapers gave the kids plastic baggies and told them to bag the papers and just try to hit the front yard.
Later still, I suppose they couldn't get enough kids to do the job so they recruited adults who had cars to cover larger areas of town. They would drive down the street at 40 mph and just sling papers out the window. If it landed anywhere at all on the property it was considered a successful delivery.
IMO today we've hit absolute bottom. One of the (print) papers I like to read is the Sunday NY Times. It's printed locally by the Dallas Morning News and distributed by their crack crew of
I'm surprised they don't just tell us to come on by and pick one up, or better yet, just go on-line and read it there (which is what I do M-Sat) and quit callin' and wakin' em up. "Paying customers are just so darn demanding these days...sheesh!"
Listen up Amazon, REI, LL Bean, and those handful of others who still have excellent customer service: Don't let your people mingle with the general public. Filter the air in your buildings and boil all water before use. Offer all available immunizations against this insipid "give-a-shit" disease that is devouring customer service across our land. Your reputation, your very existence even, depends on it!
S
