How Much Extra for Thinking?

Since we seem to be on a roll with customer service mishap stories lately, I thought I’d go looking for one that demonstrates the central problem with the customer service function, and it didn’t take long to come up with one. According to this story in the Grand Rapids Press, a local Michigan amusement park is catching heat because they required a quadriplegic Marine veteran and his caregiver to pay full price for admission last week. The man’s family is raising cane, saying that as patriotic Americans we should offer free admission to this man in gratitude for the fact that he was wounded defending the country – and because he wasn’t going to be going on any of the rides in his condition, and such. While I understand their feelings, I think they’re missing the point…

A customer service representative (CSR) is usually the lowest level of employee in any organization, often given no particular training and required to have no particular skills. They are generally hired at minimum wage, especially in such basic public-contact jobs as selling tickets/taking tickets at the entrance to an amusement park, and frequently treated ever more abusively by their own managers than they are by the public. The turnover is horrendous, because any rational person will try to migrate into a better class of job as soon as possible. And yet, these bottom-level personnel may be the only members of your company with whom your customers have any direct interaction. A rude, inexperienced, or just incompetent CSR can completely destroy the company’s relationship with a customer – all because the company was unwilling to spring for higher wages (get a better level of employee) and more training…

In the case in question, the CSRs manning the gate had been given the company’s admissions policies, and told they were not to make any exceptions to those policies. This is generally the only way to ensure that the rules are applied even-handedly, to all potential visitors. Failure to do so might result in special discounts (or free admissions) being issued to one race of people but not another; to attractive members of the opposite sex but not to ugly ones (or those of the wrong gender), to people from one class, one religion, or one neighborhood but not the other, or to friends of whoever is manning the entry gate, but not strangers. Adherence to those policies is also the only way to avoid having dozens (or hundreds) of visitors each day insisting on free admission because they (or their companions) have cancer, heart disease, gout, glaucoma, diabetes, psoriasis, acne, MS, PMS, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, wool sorter’s disease, ticks, swine flu, ringworm, hemorrhagic fever, hypochondria, or a slight headache…

Obviously, exceptions to this policy are sometimes going to be necessary, if only to avoid the sort of media-driven outrage you’re seeing in this article (and about half of the comments about it). Personally, I’ve always felt that regular Veterans discounts are good for business anyway, but if that’s too difficult, you could always issue standing orders than anyone who has lost the use of three or more limbs while in service to our country shall be given a break on park admissions. But you can not, in reason, expect some poor jerk making minimum wage at the gate to sort out that policy on the spur of the moment. If you want people on those bottom-level jobs who are capable of making independent decisions, based on their assessment of the situation in logical terms, then you’re going to have to recruit them, train them, and give them the authority to do so…

Which is going to cost extra. Don’t kid yourself; people capable of functioning at that level are unlikely to take minimum-wage jobs, even during an economic crisis like this one, and if they do, they won’t stay on the job any longer than it takes to find a better one. The fact that public relations disasters like this one won’t happen as often will help make up the cost difference; you could also raise ticket prices or work harder at promoting the park (increase volume/sales), although you should probably do that anyway. But you can’t just expect an untrained, inexperienced CSR to put their job on the line and make a command decision that follows their personal ideal of decency but violates your written rules…