Yesterday I had two annoying traumas. One of which involved a replacement cell phone that I payed to have expedited. The other was a pizza order.
The replacement phone hadn’t arrived Monday afternoon so I called them to ask what had happened. The person who took my tech call to replace my phone asked me if I wanted it sent express for a charge and then ignored my request to do so.
The person assured my I wouldn’t be charged. And then asked if there was anything else she could do.
“Yes, could you send a message up the line to the person who took the order and explain that he made a mistake and my phone will now be delayed because of his error.”
“But you won’t be charged sir, there’s nothing to worry about.”
See, that’s what pisses me off. Not only didn’t their department ‘service’ me to begin with, but when I asked them to prevent repeating the problem for others they ignored me as if I’d missed the point that an apology made it go away.
Dear customer service, an apology if empty not only does not fix a problem, but proves to the end customer that you really don’t care about the customer anyways.
Onto the Pizza delivery…
Last night at 6pm we called for a food delivery at a friend’s house. The street has a strange name and it’s a small off-off-a main street residential road. At 6:45 the first call came in. My friend who lives there of course fielded the call only to discover she had to explain a second time what the address was.
Then there was the 2nd, third, and 4th calls. Each time she was unable to get the person to understand street names, or the request to explain where he was so wi could give him directions.
By the 5th call 7:30… we were all getting rather unhappy, hungry and annoyed at the incompetence of the driver. I offered to field call #5. I made him pull out a local map book (which he said he had) and made him read it to me street by street.
“I’m sorry, my english is no so good, Yes?”
“Yes.”
It turned out that he was incapable of reading a map, following street and reading the roads that intersected it involved him jumping back and forth around the blocks. It turned out, that he did not have the map he said he did. It turned out that I had to patronize him and treat him like a 4 year old to make him understand where we were.
At 7:40 he showed up. Which was lucky for the guests as we almost ate the person who showed up at 7:35 to teach a class.
(Ding dong)
FOOD
Door!
Aww. You’re not food.
Then we had to explain our reaction.
So, the guy shows up with food. I payed him no tip beyond the $0.30 that I wasn’t going to try to explain that he owed me.
Now, I guess I’m a mean evil person. I don’t like incompetence. To me incompetence is the inability to do the basic tasks required of the job or activity you are doing. For Pizza delivery it’s the following
Personally, I don’t even care if you’re friendly when you arrive. But this guy… I think he needs to be fired. Not released, not transferred, not retrained. I think he needs to be fired and the guy that hired him should be too.
Grymble. Yes, he apologized fully for being late.
This of course, accomplished nothing.