Customer Service - NOT

I wanted to tell you about an experience I had recently at the local UPS depot - now it's important to note this was the corporate depot not a franchise!
I had arranged to pick up a package at the depot (rather than having it delivered to our home where we wouldn't be anyway) First problem occurred when I couldn't find a place to park. There was a dedicated customer parking area but it was full. I went into the office after parking in a staff parking spot (in violation of the posted sign...) I go into the dingy little cubby and there is only one person at the counter. (Why is the parking area full?) I wait a few minutes while the person in front of me completes paying for his COD package and I help him through the door.
I speak to the 19 year old kid in the grey sweatshirt and sideways baseball cap - we discuss the parking problem, he commiserates with me, I suggest that maybe towing someone would solve their problem (mostly in jest actually). Baseball cap kid goes in the back for my package leaving the door open to the back area of the loading bay so I can see the five people lounging around, with maybe one or two actually moving packages into trucks. Then a PA announcement comes over from the manager asking employees to move their vehicles out of customer parking. So far so good - while the kid in the sweatshirt and cap looks shoddy - he's done good work, got my package quickly and talked to management about my problem. Then the kicker - the meatheads in the back yell back at the PA to "Shut Up". I'm still standing in the dingy little entry way and can see and hear all of this - I almost yelled at them - I was angry. I left the place and placed a twenty minute complaint call to the UPS 1-800 number (asked for a supervisor first.)
What a colossal customer service failure - I can't park, I'm served by a kid who looks like he should be out on his skateboard not behind a business counter, the counter itself looks like something out of the 70's. Then the rampant disrespect shown by the employees to the management.
Why on earth would I ever do business with UPS? Now they have an annoyed customer who is blogging on their faults...it's easy to think that 10+ people will read this ... a PR disaster. (The standard PR rule I was taught in school was that a happy customer tells 1 person unhappy customers tell 10)

Here's what should have happened:
1) The customer parking area should have been open to park in.
2) The kid should have been in uniform - (not that he did a bad job really)
3) The gentleman in front of me should have been helped by UPS staff out to his vehicle with his large box - easy and cheap improvement in customer experience.
4) The counter space should have been clean, modern, well painted in corporate colours with corporate logo
5) The door to the shipping area should have automatically been closed as my package was retrieved.

It's the year 2007, thousands of customer service books have been written and published in the last decade - and companies still can't get the basics right???

Evan

Photo Credit: wok http://www.flickr.com/photos/mworrell/266180687/

Spring Thaw - St. Vital Park, Winnipeg

Spring Thaw - St. Vital Park, Winnipeg
Originally uploaded by Tuktoyaktuk.

I almost feel as if the world is waking up, with only a few warm days it's amazing how much the snow has melted. I can now go to work without my boots!

I can see many of the plants in our garden, and my mind is increasingly turning to our yard tasks ahead - sod and retaining stone to purchase, path to repair and cleanup, seeds to start (they're in the kitchen greenhouse) There might even be compost to pull out and get ready for the garden (it's had 2 years now)

The basement, though 'DONE' needs a good cleaning (as does the rest of the house - can you say 'Spring Cleaning'! Maybe we can start that this weekend...

I'm finally sleeping better and 'House Management' (the just living each day stuff - remember we have a 21 month old ) has been much easier recently. I've been trying to really move myself actively toward the 8 - action vs. my tendency toward a built in delay to 'gather more information' . I'm beginning to 'live' (not just know) the fact that the delays actually make things worse. It's still not all right (I missed processing some forms for a Scouting issue and also missed a phone call to another Scouting contact that I should have done last week. But it's not so much of a panic each morning as it once was.

I'm looking forward to spring this year. Much to do and clean and grow, maybe even myself!

Take Care!

CBC DRM Junk

Tod Maffin indicates on the Inside the CBC Blog that CBC intends to post clips of some of their shows online, which is great! Problem is that they are going to encode them in the DivX format and shackle them with DRM.

If they don't want people to share their videos then they shouldn't make them available! To believe that anything that is web posted can be contained or controlled is simply silly these days. The only thing the DRM does is make it more difficult for legitimate users to use. Those who want the images bad enough will grab them anyway - and will repost them onto better formats like YouTube.

I for one will NOT use or buy ANY web content in any form that has been infected with DRM it’s just too risky after the viral software distributed on SONY music CDs in 2005.

A number of high profile Canadian artists have come out against DRM (Sarah McLachlan, Avril Lavigne, Barenaked Ladies amongst others) see http://www.musiccreators.ca/wp These are the performers and industry that CBC purports to promote!

A more progressive and community supportive stance would have been for the CBC to license their material under a Creative Commons license so that fans like me could share and promote their material freely but they would retain the right to prevent commercial use and disallow modification of it’s content. (see http://creativecommons.org/ )

Evan Young